


been happening all along

by hardscrabble



Series: little bird [ariadne who?-verse] [4]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, ariadne ain't, this burn is so slow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2019-09-30 08:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17220257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardscrabble/pseuds/hardscrabble
Summary: When he’s not on the job, Arthur is ruthless and tyrannical in commandeering however many acres of furniture he deems it necessary to occupy. And, well, someone has to pour the scotch, so Eames does.





	1. who I have been

**Author's Note:**

> That week on the first level and the day following landing at LAX, from Eames. (Chapter 6 and 7 of play the goddamn part. In this 'verse, Ariadne isn't quite herself.)

The thing with killing time in dreams isn’t that it’s boring; it’s that it so frequently isn’t, and the boredom is always drawn-out vigilance punctuated by frantic activity. It’s not the fuzzy soothing kind of monotony you can sink into and woolgather during; you’re always waiting for the next thing.

Except here, where the bastard who sold them out—and Eames can’t even say he didn’t see it coming from Yusuf—was sodding decent enough, in a twisty cowering sort of way, to build a damn bomb shelter. And here, where the mark’s mental substrate is so scrambled with topside grief and new information it can’t hold a thought. And here, where—Christ, killing time in _this_ dream is boring as _fuck all_ , Eames thinks, stretching his arms above his head from where he lies on the floor of the kitchenette.

He’s been awake since two, although who knows if there’s any point in doing nightly watches anymore—they’ll find out today on patrol. Arthur had stayed up after he’d woken Eames for the watch, because Ari was awake, of course, which is still horrifying in a way that Eames simply refuses to examine too closely. In the way of dreams, especially these long ones where nothing much happens, everyone is more sensitive, thinner-skinned, emotions closer to the surface and quicker to change and more susceptible to suggestion, to extremes, and Eames has been very careful indeed to cut off any trains of thought ( _trains_ , lord) headed toward Ari’s dip into Limbo and the number of ways she could have—well.

The three of them had had a long meandering sort of conversation, Ari silly with sleep-deprivation and Arthur nearly relaxed through the shoulders, somehow culminating in making several dozen of those ridiculous square beaked fortune tellers out of legal-pad paper, for idiotic stories and predicted futures and, eventually, puppetry. Ari had laughed for real, in a way that wasn’t _oh, you have said something I should find amusing_ or anxiety giggling, which was rather a high point, and at the beginning of Ari’s actual watch Arthur had given Eames a look and a nod that said _all right, I’m convinced, she’s good,_ and gone to bed.

Eames himself, at four A.M., was not _unconvinced_ , but still edgy about leaving her entirely on her own—she’s been getting vague, unmoored, even with the naps on the couch; she comes alert at intervals with too much white around her irises. He’d be lying if he said, after the third level, that it were just her sleep troubles making him jumpy, but he’s not talking, so he’s not _saying_ anything, now, is he?

So he’d stayed on the couch fiddling with paper and they’d talked about all manner of things, palmistry and phrenology and reading tea leaves and the summer Eames had spent at fifteen cold-reading out of a booth at the seaside with tarot cards as a prop, where half his earnings had been fees and half from refining his pickpocketing skills on the nighttime crowds. (He left out the part where someone’s granny had scared the bejesus out of him by taking his cards from him and doing, as she said, a _proper_ reading, reciting information she _couldn’t_ have known about his school crush—dear James—and his first forged signature and his fondness for Poirot novels, and foretelling a far too interesting future that would leave him _begging_ for an honest living, and shame on him for scamming.) He’d folded a handful of origami animals, the ones he could remember, and well after six Ari had finally made him get off her couch so she could try to sleep.

He’s been on the kitchen floor approximately since. As a change in pace.

He notes, with a little amusement, that he hasn’t yet wished for an honest living. Merely a slight break from this fractally dishonest one and its current trappings of _godawful boredom_.

The street outside the bunker has been empty as a movie set for fourteen subjective hours—emptier, he supposes, as movie sets have all those technical people running about. The last vehicle on the road had vanished from sight at seven thirty-eight P.M. the night previous. The car in question, a Mini in eye-searing turquoise with white racing stripes, had had one of those tepid COEXIST bumper stickers and a Star Wars-themed stick figure family at the bottom of the rear windshield. Clearly one of Fischer’s memories rather than a random car-formed placeholder. Like the girl with the pink streak in her fringe and the Docs covered in rainbow glitter—a DIY job, he’d thought. Eames had rather liked them both, visual shouts in the sea of neutrals of the dreamed city.

Now, for the hell of it, he forges the girl, her shredded denim shorts and black stockings and slouchy cardigan and sooty eyeliner, and checks the job in a hand mirror. The shape of her mouth is a little too stock-photo and he’s not certain her eyebrows are right, but it’s not like she’s there to check anymore, _and_ he has nothing of hers to mimic but the attitude she’d held for four days outside the bunker. When Eames narrows her eyes and angles her chin up, though, the reflection looks satisfactory. He memorizes her profile and slots the feel of her away in his repertoire for additional polishing. Never know when that sort of look might come in handy.

He drops the forge when he hears slipper scuffs—Yusuf approaching. Not that Eames is shy about incomplete work, but it’d be a bit _much_ , wouldn’t it, finding a punk schoolgirl from the mark’s memory sacked out on the kitchenette floor when you just want to make your tea. And while Yusuf screwed them all, it was Cobb who’d told him to, and Eames can’t quite justify such a juvenile prank, especially when Yusuf went to the trouble for the bunker in the first place. That’s proper paranoia, right there, and Eames respects it.

And besides, he might yell—he takes surprises poorly, Yusuf does—and that’d wake Ari.

Dreams in dreams—that is, _natural_ dreams, not going down with a PASIV two levels (or three, or four, _if_ Limbo is really just another damn level, and if you’re Dom _bloody_ Cobb or, apparently, Ariette “Ariadne Finch” Vickers) but the ordinary sensory scrambles presented to a dreamer getting a kip, whether out of necessity or just to pass the time—aren’t much different than they are topside; they’re more likely to be remembered, that’s all. But from what he understands, they’re also not quite what the little bird is actually facing. It’s something like muscle memory, or an inner-ear thing, and she says it comes in the twilight state before actual sleep, which is a psychological fog to begin with—all sorts of things emerging, strange nerve twitches and half-formed thoughts flowing into each other.

And, for Ari, falling.

Yusuf steps over him, muttering something that might be _good morning_. It’s well after nine, but Eames recognizes he’s a bit of a statistical outlier when it comes to dream-sleeping (hell, the terminology in this field), so he merely makes a noise that sounds approximately pleasant in reply.

“Y’want tea?” says Yusuf, only a little blearily.

It’s the sixth _fucking_ day and Eames is bored beyond speaking with the way nothing tastes, and yet, call it reflex or culture or bloody stereotyping, he replies, “Ta. Whatever you’re having.”

“Gonna get off the floor?”

“Oh, eventually.” The ceiling is industrial off-white. Not painted, because Yusuf is a shite textural dreamer; it just _is_ , flat and a little shiny. No brushstrokes. No artistry. Eames considers fucking with it and decides he’s too bored to care.

From the couches just over the half-wall separating the lounge area from the kitchenette, there’s a rustle and a creak and a _horrid_ series of damp crackly popping noises, followed shortly by a second round. Ari, awoken, doing unspeakable things to her spine; Eames is almost used to it. Yusuf glances up and over at her. “Morning,” he says.

“Time?” Ari croaks. “Tea?” She appears in Eames’s view and leans against the fridge, wrapped in her purple fleece blanket and looking forlorn and muzzy. Her face is too pale, eyelids puffy and heavy, and there’s a tangle of lines on her left cheek from her pillow. She could be fourteen, if she weren’t a level down in a bunker she created for a heist she wiggled her way into on the behest of one of the founding fathers of dreamshare. If she weren’t developing new theories of dreamshare mechanics on her _first damn job_.

She’s a bit of a phenomenon, really, he thinks as he checks his watch. “It’s ten ’til ten.”

Ari groans. “Three _hours_.” Of sleep. She lets her head fall against the fridge door with a thump. “I’d fucking…” Sideways, she eyes him, and says, “Why are you on the floor?”

“Need I be somewhere else?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.

Ari opens her mouth, pauses, and says, “Point.” She pushes herself off the fridge and takes two steps, then drops to sit between Eames and the half-wall and lies down on her side. “Nothing means anything,” she adds, once she’s situated. He isn’t certain whether it’s a commentary on seating arrangements or dream life or philosophy; she says it as if she’s talking about the weather.

“It gets like that sometimes,” says Eames, because it does. “Two days, love.”

There’s a chart on the wall outside the kitchen, one that Arthur had done up on graph paper as soon as he’d inventoried the place that first day. It tracks the time elapsed here and the corresponding time topside. Arthur arranged it in chunks of five hours, each representing fifteen topside minutes, and he crosses out each bit once it’s passed. So when Ari pokes him in the side—which is a little bit of a surprise, her being Ari, but then, _everyone’s_ guard goes down a bit in long-term dreams when no one’s getting shot—and says woefully, “Two days and nine _hours_ ,” he figures she’s probably right. “I’m so _done_ with this.”

“Remember how you said on the second day that you were sleeping topside?”

Ari pokes him again, much harder. Eames shoots her a smile, apologetic, and she sticks her tongue out, so he crosses his eyes, which is how Arthur finds the three of them: Yusuf standing over three mugs waiting for the kettle to boil, staring at nothing, and Eames and Ari lying on the floor, pulling faces at each other.

Arthur sighs noiselessly and gets a mug to set in the line in front of Yusuf.

Then he lies down on the linoleum on Eames’s other side, knees up to stay out of Yusuf’s way. “It’s not any different from here,” he says after a moment, voice a little rough from sleep.

“Hush, darling,” Eames murmurs. “We can at least pretend.”

***

Eames and Yusuf patrol a couple hours later, wearing pajamas dreamed into fatigues—mainly for kicks. A little bit of practice, a little bit of a joke, mostly just something to _do_.

The city is resoundingly empty. Neither pigeons nor rats to be seen. Not even flies around the dumpsters. The dumpsters themselves still hold garbage bags, but there’s no smell to speak of, and not so much as a breath of wind to ruffle the plastic. The still air is nothing-temperature, neither cool nor warm.

As if the city’s forgotten weather as well as people.

If he were out here with Arthur, he would be thinking _why_ and _how_ in the same way as Eames. But Arthur’s in the bunker with Ari, probably cleaning the contents of the gun closet yet again, so Eames says, “But _you’re_ our dreamer. No matter what’s happened to Fischer—”

“It gets funny, these long ones,” Yusuf replies, squinting up the street. The city’s terrain is nearly perfectly flat, except around the river. This street in particular is a straightaway that probably goes for the whole two miles of the map and then on to the next tile, with those periodic thingies Ari had mentioned that Yusuf had had fits over. “I’m keeping the buildings and the streets, yeah, but the population would be up to the subject, and after seven hours under topside sedation my CNS isn’t sending any new signals, so that’s the weather gone.”

“Why’s it so bloody bright? The sun’s not even out.” The sky is as flat-looking as the ceiling inside the bunker, pure white.

Yusuf shrugs. “Couldn’t tell you.”

So that leaves the professional’s opinion of _it gets funny_. Wonderful. Eames doesn’t quite roll his eyes, because it’s not actually Yusuf’s fault he can’t explain every centimeter of the ins and outs of long-term dreaming under heavy sedation with a subject in enormous emotional turmoil. Which is rather a specific implementation of dreamshare to begin with. Besides, he’s a _chemist_ ; he pokes things and mixes things and maybe stands watch topside. This, _inception_ —if it’s inception; it’s not a certain thing—is his first field work in bloody years, aside from the occasional compound test, but those aren’t the _field_ ; they’re goddamn practice greens.

The skyscraper two blocks ahead—a really horrible-looking one, topped with this absurd skeletal dome-like thing that really looks rather rude—is… off. It’s from Boston, firstly, but secondly—Eames narrows his eyes and peers at it, then wanders out into the street for a different angle. It feels odd, even in dreaming, after this bloody _long_ in dreaming and in this dream in _fucking_ particular, to go and stand right out in the middle of the sea of asphalt, but he needs a different—Across the bike lane divider, he finally gets it, gets the building in front of another within his line of sight.

And he’s right.

It’s fading. It hasn’t gone transparent, but its outlines are fuzzy, enough that against the blue glass of the second more distant skyscraper he can see it smudging like a line of smoke.

Yusuf is already next to him. Sure, he’s not frequently in the field, but he’s not a coward, either. Mostly. “What’s—oh.” He stands straight, letting his assault rifle drop, and says, “Hmm.”

“That a professional assessment?” asks Eames lightly.

“Piss off.” Yusuf turns, and Eames takes the opposite direction. Nothing quite so obvious as the rude skyscraper, but… yes, the edges are going. The lines of the city are starting to waver, like a heat shimmer.

“D’you think if we went up…” Eames starts, and knows before he’s finished speaking that they won’t. Too many variables, going into a dreamed building just to see what can be seen. Even if the visible outdoor projections have vanished. And _especially_ if the building looks as if it’s going to fog.

“I’d recommend against it,” says Yusuf. “And that _is_ a professional assessment.”

They stay out another hour, watching—there’s not much to watch, but the changes are _there_ , subtle, not the same discrete disappearances of the projections and their cars, but a gentle fading, a smearing that becomes slightly more evident as the time passes. As if an artist has decided the colors need blending, but is taking their bloody time about it.

When they’re back in the bunker and Arthur’s demanding why they’ve been so long with his scowl that means _fuck you both, I have to pretend I’m angry instead of worried_ , Yusuf says, “City’s going. I’m holding it, but Fischer’s mind isn’t. I’d assume he’s on his way to delta-wave sleep, and once he’s slipped fully past we’ll lose the place.” He’s speaking quietly, because Ari is asleep—blessedly. “No idea what that’ll look like, but if you’d like my guess—”

“I’d _like_ better than a guess,” Arthur drawls.

Yusuf nods, unmoved. “Patrols are going to be an unnecessary risk,” he says. “In my opinion. The bunker has never been part of Fischer’s dreamscape. It’s mine, and it’s reinforced by the rest of you. So it’ll hold up as long as I’m under, and probably longer. I’d recommend discontinuing the patrols, but it’s your call.”

Arthur narrows his eyes and considers. He’s not actually upset with Yusuf, Eames thinks; he just happens to be looking upset in Yusuf’s direction. Then he says, “Okay. That was our last patrol. And the night watches aren’t doing any good.” Needlessly, he adds, “We stay here for the duration.”

They disperse. Yusuf naps, or stares at the insides of his eyelids, and Arthur sits on the floor at the far end of the bunker doing something in a notebook, and Eames makes another bloody cup of bloody not-tea and feels like a Douglas Adams character.

***

In the way of things, time passes.

At intervals, they make tea and instant noodles and hot chocolate. They play chess and checkers and ever-varying hybrids of the two that Arthur calls Calvinboard, which makes Ari call him a dork, which makes Arthur get huffy, which makes Eames laugh.

Night puts up a poor showing, that sixth day; the light doesn’t bother to disappear, which makes more sense than it doesn’t, considering the lack of a visible sun that afternoon. Eames stays awake for most of it on the couch opposite Ari, watching the city dissolve into itself. The darkest it gets is a sort of half-hearted pre-thunderstorm gloom, all in shades of grey rather than the blue from whatever that light-scattering thingy is called. When Ari wakes—only two hours after she finally dropped off in the midst of a desultory discussion of Austen cinematic adaptations—he asks her.

“Rayleigh,” she replies promptly, and stretches until her spine pops, then smiles, pleased with her awfully noisy skeleton. “For the… shit. Third? There were two in a row, barons, who did physics, and one was… fuck, radioactivity? And the other did optics, but I can’t remember who was what.”

“But it’s Rayleigh scattering?”

Ari nods. “Their family name is, like, Strutt,” she says. “Would’ve been a hell of a lot easier to remember which was which, without the fucking… the goddamn _peerage_. Like, Bob Strutt versus his dad Johnny—” She snaps her fingers and points at, as far as Eames can tell, nothing. “That’s it,” she says triumphantly. “We had a mnemonic in undergrad. _Robert_ did _radium_ , and he was the later one, so—”

“I might appreciate the baronetcy just for aesthetics,” says Eames. “‘Strutt scattering’ is a bit awful, isn’t it? And Rayleigh, rays, that’s all very optics and radioactivity, right?”

Arthur emerges from the bunks—they’re sectioned off with ad-hoc curtains, a length of clothesline and some sheets—and shuffles towards them, looking smeared with sleep, his hair all over the place. “Hey,” he says, gaze flipping between them, and abruptly goes alert. “What’s—you’re okay?”

“All’s well, darling,” Eames answers, and he’d judge it as being too quick if he weren’t already too late, Arthur wearing his job face and running calculations beneath ridiculously sleep-mussed hair. Well, maybe—

“We’re talking about why the sky is blue,” says Ari, and then glares at the windows like they’re personally offending her; they show milky nothing. “When it’s not fucking lazy _sloppy_ illogical dream sky.” She sounds murderous.

Arthur blinks and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re… Okay.”

“And Eames was just starting on _puns_ ,” Ari adds. Just as Eames starts to worry—the sudden bounciness in her tone is that sort of half-manic kind that, when dealing with the very underslept, puts his teeth on edge—she slumps and drawls, “It’s a real party.”

“I can tell,” Arthur replies, just as dry, and continues to the bathroom. Ari goes back to sleep, and Eames goes back to doing nothing at all.

When Arthur passes on his way back, he pauses again at the couches. “You’re okay?” he says again, but quietly, almost gently, and touches Eames’s shoulder with two fingers.

He still hasn’t any idea what the rules are, or if there are rules at all, but it’s five in the morning and physics is wrong and Arthur is nearly soft around the eyes again, so Eames tips his head to the side until his cheek brushes Arthur’s hand. “I’m all right.”

Arthur moves his hand, slowly, lays his palm on the flat of Eames’s shoulder and lets Eames rest his head against his wrist. “You’ve been up?”

“As usual. I’ll kip down later.”

The breath through Arthur’s nose is too quiet to be called a laugh. “Liar.”

“Not to you,” says Eames, far too honestly, and follows that with, “Later’s a relative term, you know. Go back to bed.”

Arthur taps his first and second fingers against Eames’s collarbone and moves off without a word.

***

Sometime much, much later, Ari and Arthur compare the card games that were popular in their respective secondary schools. Arthur speaks with great enthusiasm and true nostalgia about something called Egyptian Rat-something that was apparently entirely cover for mutilating one’s friends and enemies using hand jewelry. Yusuf reveals that the ratfuck game—or whatever—is based on a nineteenth-century thing from Britain that got a callout in one of the Dickens novels everyone’s supposed to have read, and expects Eames to _know_ this, which allows Eames to posture for hours about stereotyping and time-travel, which invites Yusuf to posture back about colonialism and punching up.

That takes up the majority of the seventh day, in fact, nearly replicating the lazy sort of rapport they had in Mombasa over too much gin, and Eames suspects he may actually continue working with Yusuf, despite everything. Ari remains sleep-deprived and drifty, disjointed; Eames spends, apparently, slightly too much time watching her, because every so often he catches Arthur watching _him_ , looking worried—for Arthur, in the way that could be mistaken for suspicion, but Eames hasn’t made that mistake in years—and he scrapes up another one-liner or absurd question or _something_ to cover for himself.

They are all trying slightly too hard, but it’s working, in that time continues to pass, not entirely unbearably. Towards midnight—although the light isn’t changing—Ari says, “Is the sky being wrong Yusuf’s fault, or…”

“We suspect Fischer’s,” says Arthur, and Eames remembers she had been asleep for that conversation yesterday. “That he’s in deep sleep, so he lost the higher-level activity that would support the city. The dream is held up collectively, but it’s biased towards the subject’s impressions, unless the information is something the designated dreamer cares to specify. And the other dreamers—us—we don’t have enough influence to affect the overall physics.”

Ari’s eyes narrow. “So—Yusuf specifies this space.” Yusuf himself is asleep already. “And we don’t _affect_ it, but we hold it up.”

“Especially with this much time under,” Eames puts in. “It’ll be quite stable. Even if Yusuf comes out first, when the sedative wears off. Which is likely, I suppose, considering body chemistry and metabolism and all that. He’s used to his own mixes.”

“But he’d have adjusted his dose to compensate,” says Arthur, and looks sharply at him for confirmation.

Eames shrugs. _Sorry, darling._ “Might have done. But I suspect he’ll have been light about it, to keep the timing right topside. In any case, the dream will be stable as anything when we’re coming out. We’ve certainly spent enough time in the bloody place—not that it isn’t excellent, little bird, only—”

Ari says drily, “It’s not exactly my best work. But you mean—waking up—it’s not going to be like—” She stops, eyes on Arthur, and raises her eyebrows.

“ _No_ ,” says Arthur, vehement, and if Eames is any judge he looks _guilty_. “Nothing like. Jesus, if it’s _anything_ —”

“Not that it’d be a big deal,” Ari adds, a little vague, looking at the coffee table. “I mean, the first couple times, yeah, it sucked, but—” She turns back to Arthur quite suddenly with a glare. “Stop _worrying_. Fuck’s sake, I did the entire _job_ without losing it. I did _Limbo_ , idiot.”

Eames isn’t following, but he watches as Arthur straightens and swallows and nods, and as Ari watches _him_ and nods back. “See? Training worked,” she says, sounding satisfied, and then gets up from the couch. “Gonna try and sleep. ’Night. Eames, punch him if he gets antsy.”

 _Training_. Eames says something appropriately ridiculous, or at least, he thinks he does, because he’s busy waiting until Ari is out of sight so he can turn to Arthur and say, voice low, “Training, darling. At Dana’s?”

Arthur looks at him. “Yeah. I told you.” The line of his jaw is a little sharper, just a bit—

“For firearms work,” says Eames, watching him closely, and sees the flicker as he doesn’t quite blink. With something like dread, he asks, as lightly as he can, “What _did_ you get up to?”

Sighing almost silently through his nose, Arthur looks down at his hands, then back up. “We’re gonna go sit by the gun closet,” he says, and stands.

 _Are we, now_ , Eames thinks, but _does not_ say, because if Arthur’s _inviting_ him then he _wants_ to tell, or he recognizes that he should, even though he thinks he’ll piss Eames off, which maybe he will, because training with a PASIV when it’s not simply skill work or dry runs involves _far_ too many possibilities, and when they’re both sitting on the floor in the farthest corner of the bunker, almost knee-to-knee, Arthur sighs again and says, without looking at him, “Acclimation and escape training.”

There’s one light source here, a single low-wattage lamp on a lonely-looking side table, and it turns the shadows under Arthur’s eyes into craters.

“In four hours,” Arthur continues, voice dull and empty. “Topside.”

Eames stills, then carefully interlaces his fingers and drops his linked hands over one knee, watching Arthur.

 _Acclimation training_ is the clever professional jargon-y term for taking people under and mutilating them until they’re used to it and can just get on with killing themselves out of dreams when they don’t want to be there. A by-the-hour paid thing, an experienced dreamer working with a paranoid tycoon who doesn’t trust their militarization or a relatively new extractor or, sometimes, government operatives. Generally spread over a full ten-hour business day, with a lunch break and puke breaks and whatever’s necessary. Eames has taught a few training courses, but he hasn’t the taste or the reputation for it. It’s one of the ways Arthur keeps Cobb running—

 _Kept_. One of the cashflows that Arthur _had kept_ Cobb afloat with, and may he never need to again, although they’ll figure that out topside, damn it all. One of the reasons Arthur had maintained his contacts with most global intelligence agencies despite being allied with someone on the wrong side of the law. He’s been very, very careful in the last three years.

When quite drunk in Córdoba, about two years ago, Arthur had admitted to Eames that he most wished he could forge during acclimation training, because the clients he got could never look at him again without thinking _butcher_.

And he’d—with _Ari_ —

Arthur looks up at him, finally, and swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Do tell,” says Eames, and he’s shocked at himself, at his own coolness. “Was this on a voluntary basis?”

“ _Jesus_ , what the— Of _course_ it was fucking voluntary.” Arthur’s face is as flat and murderous as it was a week ago, in that horrible first half-hour in the warehouse when Saito was dying and they were just working out how Dom fucking Cobb had screwed them, and Eames hates to see that look back on him, but at the same time, he’s not going to be _pleased_ Arthur had inflicted _that_ on the little bird— “I told her we could keep doing target practice or I could teach her how shit goes wrong.” He glares at Eames. “I wanted to _shoot_ myself, okay? The second I said it—of course she was gonna go for it, and she does that thing _you_ do where nothing matters, just shrugs, like _better the devil you know_ —”

“In four _hours_? Are there time trials for you lot?” But that’s going too far; immediately Eames says, “No, that’s wrong, you wouldn’t—”

Arthur lets out a breath, eyebrows going up as his face relaxes. “Took effort to keep up,” he says.

“Christ.” Their little civilian bird with all that _stuff_ in her head, maths and optics and cover stories and the specter of Cobb’s Mal, chivvying Arthur along through a good six dozen nightmares. For effect, and maybe to back off from jumping for Arthur’s throat, he muses, “You reckon she was grown in a lab?”

The smile seems to take Arthur as much by surprise as it does Eames; he tips his head back, looking rueful. “No. Shit, that’s why I—the whole thing, when we were talking.”

“Right, with the incomplete sentences and pregnant pauses and _utter_ lack of—of nouns—”

“That, yeah,” says Arthur. “No, there was—at the end of the first day we were still just drilling, but I had it hail and she made some kind of armor to keep it off her, and I wanted to see if the helmet was bulletproof so I, you know, had her shoot it, and—”

“Oh, _lord_ ,” Eames says, burying his face in his hands. He can just see it, the helmet being gloriously _un_ -bulletproof and Ari shooting Arthur right in the bloody chest. “Darling, that’s _horrendous_ —”

“No, no, it wasn’t even—” Out of nowhere, Arthur is laughing, laughing and trying to keep it silent. “The armor _was_ bulletproof, but I— _Jesus_ , Eames, it was so goddamn stupid—I forgot about fucking ricochet—”

Eames drops his hands and stares again. “Arthur. _Really_.” And, “She really managed a bulletproof—?”

“So I have a mangled shoulder and she’s fucking freaking but I’m like, hey, opportunity, so I have her tap me out, and I try to warn her, that the dream would collapse once she got me, but I’m, you know, fucking _shot_ , and—” Arthur sobers abruptly. “It wasn’t good. I mean, we laughed about it, once she was up and she checked everything. Including my head. But—the sanity-keeping kind of laughing. And I guess—” He shakes his head, just once. “It took her a bit, coming up. Longer than if she’d just tapped out, so I think she had to reload, which means… you know. And we’d been under for awhile, but it’s not like she knows the grounds I use.”

On one of his more memorable early jobs, Eames had been in the middle of memorizing eight names of great interest to the client, as listed by the mark, two levels down when the dreamer—Mal, actually—had to attend to something on the first level (a knife to the throat, it turned out; she’d kicked the projection’s stomach through its spine and then shot the architect who was supposed to be guarding her). Which left Eames in a bank vault that was fracturing into unreality, a drop into void, and on the other side of the void was Limbo, and he had fallen four or eight or ten of his own body lengths before he was satisfied that he knew the list and went for his gun.

But the dream had _resisted_ , like the gauze curtains typically separating levels had been replaced with rubber sheeting, and the void had wrapped itself round his wrists and slowed the damn bullet and, in terror, he’d dreamed a straight razor into one hand and dug it into the brachial of the other, and only the warmth of arterial blood had loosened the grip of Limbo. And he’d come to on the first level to stare at Mal in horrified shock, and she’d looked back in pity and shot him right on up.

So Arthur reckons Ari had had a similar brush, having just performed her first kill in dreamspace. “How the fuck did she make it bulletproof?” Eames asks, because there isn’t much to say, in the face of that.

“I—” Arthur stops, mouth open, staring at the ceiling. “Fuck. I asked her and she told me and—composites? But she said something about weaving, with… carbon and… I _definitely_ asked her, you know, give her something concrete to think about that wasn’t coming up. I just—I mean, I was more…” He shakes his head. “I was trying to keep her with me, more than I was trying to find out, right?”

“You’re a good teacher,” says Eames, and maybe he’s making less fun than usual, but really.

Arthur smiles tightly. “Good enough for her to get Cobb’s Mal.”

And that’s a fucking—Christ, Arthur had taught Ari _to shoot Cobb’s Mal_. Eames still can’t— When he saw her, eyes wide and fixed, blood-flecked on the floor of the hospital, he’d wondered whether he’d lost his bloody _mind_ before Ari stormed in, Cobb on her heels. And even further below, where he couldn’t follow, Ari, who’s _only_ known this twisted refracted fragment of Cobb’s psyche, shooting _Mal_ with Cobb’s gun, on _Arthur’s_ training—

“And she’s still speaking to you,” Eames says, instead of any of that. “And you to her—” Eames pauses, trying to remember seven days ago but also yesterday. “How was… after?”

He means too many things: _how much of a mess was she, how much of a mess were_ you _, did you sleep a wink, did you talk—_

Arthur swallows and looks at his fingers. “It was fucked,” he says, on one breath. “We were both—I don’t know, I went out at night because—you know.” He glances at Eames, guarded. Eames does know; that time in Córdoba, in the middle of a much longer job, Arthur had had a day with some defense consultant and he’d come to Eames, after, to finish pulling himself back together. “She came out herself. We smoked half a pack between us and shared the futon. Her suggestion. Had to check my die. Pragmatism, I guess—”

“Don’t be thick; it’s unbecoming,” says Eames. “Trust.”

He snorts softly. “She called me a psychotic rat bastard after the falls.”

Eames freezes, and then leans forward until his forehead hits his left knee, slowly letting out all the breath that’s in him. This—is an old argument. Eames understands, he _does_ , the practicality of the graded falls, but _Arthur_ insisting on running them to _that_ degree of exacting detail, watching over and over as the dreamers fall, as he’d watched Mal— And of _course_ he insists that the personal cost is irrelevant, which is simply bullshit, and the arguments never get farther than that because Eames doesn’t let them, too aware of where they’ll lead. So now he doesn’t start; he merely sighs, and says, “You may be one, at that.”

“Then she hugged me,” says Arthur. “And we had a picnic.”

When he looks over, sort of sideways because he’s pretzeled up on himself, Arthur is almost smiling. Eames asks, “You’re certain she’s not a clone of yours? Or a Terminator?”

“Pretty certain.” Arthur stands—he, at least, thinks the discussion is over—and holds out an absolutely unnecessary hand for Eames. “You gonna chew me out, or what?”

And it’s unnecessary, but Eames takes the hand up and then doesn’t drop it, sort of leans half on the wall and half on Arthur’s shoulder and, for a moment, rests his forehead against Arthur’s. It could be dream side effects, lowered guards and all, but Eames isn’t fond of lying to himself. “I’d rather not, if it’s all the same, darling,” he murmurs. “You did good work.”

Arthur’s fingers tighten around his for a breath of a second, and he hears him swallow. “I tried,” he says, voice ground down to a rasp. “She deserved better.”

He can’t tell if Arthur’s talking about Ari or Mal, and he doesn’t quite care, and it doesn’t make a difference, anyway. “You’re the best she could have had,” Eames replies, so softly he can barely hear himself, and before Arthur can argue that, protest his own inadequacy, he says, “Goodnight, darling,” and moves away.

***

He settles on the center bunk, bottom row—Yusuf on his left, Ari on the right against the wall. With Arthur, it gets… difficult, navigating the boundary of what they will and won’t let themselves discuss at this point, in this situation, with these unknowns still in the air and the job still an open question. And Eames is perfectly happy to tell Arthur to quit being an idiot; furthermore, he’d be _overjoyed_ to get around to the job of convincing the man that he _is enough_ , damn it—good enough, loyal enough, trustworthy enough, _worth_ enough—but he’s not certain if he’s allowed to begin yet, and so—

Well, he’d said he’d sleep, some twenty hours ago.

He does, apparently, because he wakes, which presupposes a preceding state other than wakefulness, to the sound of a glottal stop and—he counts, as he blinks and adjusts to the not-light—six fast heaving breaths, in far too short a time, somewhere off to his right.

Eames looks over and before he’s quite aware that he’s so much as thrown the blanket off he’s kneeling on the floor, right at the foot of Ari’s bunk. She herself is sitting bolt upright, legs crossed, eyes squeezed shut with one hand on her chest and the other clenched on her thigh just above her knee, as the breath catches in her throat again and there’s a horrible pause, her mouth working, like she can’t air even though— As he tries to remember everything he’s read, he asks, “Have you been up long, little bird?” pitching it gently, casually.

Ari’s eyes fly open and her throat clicks again, followed by another series of those terrible gasps. “I can’t—” she says on one of them, and it sounds thin and high, but she’s speaking, so it’s not that she’s choked on something, in which case—

“I know, love, and I want to help you,” says Eames, keeping it quiet and soft. The first day in the Paris warehouse, when she’d panicked, he’d thought _oh, good, another one like this_ , an architect with chops for design but no field use whatsoever.

He’s been spectacularly wrong.

The second he’d had it from Ari herself that she’d be on the job he’d gone off on an Internet tear, researching and feeling a bit like an idiot for caring so much as to go to the trouble. More fool him; he can’t dream medication, so there’s simply— “I hope you know you can trust me,” he’s saying, has been saying, a low stream of words, “because I’ll be right here until you’re through, and you will be through, all right?” Something in Ari’s focus changes—she sees _him_ —and she stares like he’s got three heads.

“No, I know, I probably sound rather stupid, the way these go. I’m here, though, and I’ll keep sounding like an idiot ’til you’re feeling better. Here, I’m going to—I’ve got my hand right here—” He places it near her knee, the one she’s gripping so tightly her fingernails are going white. “If you want, you can hold on, or not.”

Ari shuts her eyes again, despairing, and hyperventilates, and Eames feels like the most useless of clods.

“Little bird, can you look at me?” he asks, and then says, “And tell me what happened?”

“Falling,” she spits, in one of those horrible silences where she can’t seem to get a breath, but she opens her eyes—like black holes in the half-light—and fixes her gaze on his.

“I was afraid of that. Here, could you count with me? I—I’m going to sound more of an idiot—I heard if you breathe in through your nose, then out through your mouth, so maybe let’s—” Her throat unsticks and she glares and grabs his hand, her grip like a vise. “In, two, three, four,” he says regardless, and she inhales. “And out—” Eames blows air for a second, feeling _stupid_ , but she follows suit, and he stops and counts it out— “two, three, four. But you’re far and away too smart for that, so let’s do—um, multiples of… five.” He curses his sodding horrible maths and wishes he knew his times tables better. “In, five, ten, fifteen, and out, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. And—”

Ari shakes her head at him, and taps her fingers against his hand in tempo, following the pace he’s set. “Talk to me,” she orders.

“I’m good with that,” says Eames pointlessly. “All right. You realize now absolutely everything’s gone out of my head? It’s like a curse. There are reasons I’ve never taken up improv comedy as one of my many hats. The number of which is _considerable_ , as I’m sure you know—well, there was the seaside Tarot readings, and the various illegal income streams, but in between _those_ sorts of jobs I’ve been an office temp and a travel writer—yes, I know, but they pay those editors for a reason—and a tour guide in seven different cities in the UK alone— Little bird, you’re rushing a little, did you know?” She is; her finger-metronome just ticked up a few beats. She glares, and he counts again, one Mississippi, two…

He carries on like that, talking as if it’s any old conversation, simply one-sided, and catching Ari when she starts speeding; at one point she loses the count entirely and falls back into the breathless–hyperventilating thing again, which might be from anything, but after that she’s all right, although she’s not _calm_ by any possible interpretation of the phrase. Still rigidly upright, gripping his hand so hard his fingertips go numb, and blinking too rarely, and Eames talks and talks and talks as she counts herself through, mouthing the numbers as she inhales and exhales. She skips around the multiplication table, counting by threes and sevens and nines, then several series he can’t identify, then a Fibonacci sequence, which he knows because you can only be around Arthur so long without picking up _something_ …

He loses all sense of time, but as he’s beginning to wrack his memory for poetry to recite, Ari drops his hand and slumps backward against the wall and, in the silence of Eames figuring out what this means, says, “ _Fuck_.” And then, after a second, “Fucking Jesus shit.”

Eames examines her carefully as he flexes his hand. “I think the verse goes a bit differently in the King James, little bird.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she mutters. Her color is almost normal, although her hair is darkened with sweat, and when she lifts her hand to her face he can see it shake.

The swearing is a good sign, he thinks, but— “Here,” he says, “would you—maybe the sofa?”

Ari rubs at her face. “Yeah,” she replies, her voice small and tired. “Yeah, I think—okay.”

He gets up and Ari grabs his hand again as she scoots to the edge of the mattress, then gets her legs under her and stands. She’s shaky and slow about it, but once she’s on her feet she bumps her head against his shoulder—intentionally, like a goat or a cat, expressing affection or _pay attention_ or any number of things. Well, her fine motor control is shot. “Let’s… yeah,” she says, and blinks hard.

“Let’s.”

Ari doesn’t drop his hand, trailing behind him like a child, and that’s the most dangerous moment, for Eames, the helplessness of her, this tiny freakishly competent polymath with her shields and her swearing and her fury skinned down to—to—she’s like _Philippa_ , the last time he’d been to see the children, that quiet and watchful and exhausted from vigilance she shouldn’t have to bear, and he wishes this goddamn dream were over so fiercely, simply to get Ari away from it. And then go to see Philippa and James and start helping Phil to stop _looking out_ for the next thing that’ll take her family.

Once Eames gets her to the sofas, Ari sits on the middle cushion of the one that’s become hers, so he sits next to her, and only then does she let go of his hand, to grab at the purple fleece blanket balled up at the other end. He helps, pulls it up over her, and their furious brilliant architect curls into it, gripping it with one hand beneath her chin, and—as easily as that, as if she’d never consider doing otherwise—drops her head onto his leg like it’s a pillow. Eames puts his hand on her sweat-damp hair, stroking it away from her face, and in moments—it feels like—she’s asleep.

As easily as that. And he’d chalk it up to long-term dreamtime guard-dropping, but _Don’t be thick_ , he’d told Arthur. _Trust._

He puts his head back on the cushions, unable to shut his eyes.

In March, Mal’s father had asked him for a favor, doing up some papers for someone, and tipped him off to keep an ear on the ground for Cobb.

In June, three levels down and seven days ago, he had watched this mad creature spin a ladder to Limbo out of air and theory, and _couldn’t_ watch her lie down and fall still as a corpse—like Cobb’s Mal’s corpse, for fuck’s sake, twenty feet away—to clamber down it, and he had thought he’d rather die than know _he’d_ lost another mind like Mal’s. That had driven the detonation, more so than Robert Fischer going to bits over a pinwheel. He’d rather have fallen to fragments himself than come to on the damn 747 to find Ari, Ariette Eleanor Vickers, with just that haunted shadow in her eyes, the one that had chased Mal off the tenth floor— And now she’s asleep in his lap, and he still doesn’t know if she’ll be haunted topside, and he can’t _stand_ not knowing; he’s _sick_ of it.

He’d nearly left the field after Mal, except there was Arthur. Ari—she’s only been a player for three months, and if she vanishes once they’re topside, it might kill him. How quickly certain people—their presence, their wellbeing—become vital.

At the other end of the bunker, Arthur slaps a notebook closed with slightly more force than necessary. Has he been there all this time? Eames doesn’t bother to look for him, merely waits and brushes idly at Ari’s hair and stares at the ceiling and refuses to blink.

“She okay?” mutters Arthur, and Eames can tell from the timbre of it that his eyebrows are doing that thing, the actual concern he shows when he knows no one is looking.

He has to swallow before he can speak. “Panic attack,” he says, very low. Eames rolls his head to the side on the sofa cushion, until he has Arthur properly in view—sideways, but that’s never been an issue. He thinks of trying a smile, discards it as unnecessary effort, and instead adds, “Tired her out.”

Arthur looks him over, the X-ray sort of scan of figuring out whether _Eames_ is okay—instead of asking, which would be wasted words. Whatever he sees, he’s not fond; his mouth thins and he kneels next to the sofa, leans his elbows on the armrest. He glances at Ari and says—not asks—“Falling.”

Eames rolls his head back toward the ceiling and doesn’t answer. Arthur is probably cursing himself, he figures, blaming himself for Ari being in the field at all, for not having scared her off three months ago—

“Well, shit,” Arthur sighs, and tips sideways until he hits Eames’s side, head against his shoulder. Once he’s settled, he says, so quietly Eames feels it more than he hears it, “I want outta here.”

Which is so obvious Eames can’t stand to reply for a moment. Then, just as quietly, he says, “A shadow of Limbo.”

Arthur stiffens— _fuck, Cobb,_ Eames thinks, too late—and then forces himself to relax; Eames can nearly hear him thinking _calm down_. “In some ways,” he allows, and clamps his mouth shut (his jaw juts in a particular way when he does, this time directly into Eames’s pectoral). After a moment, he murmurs, “I want _her_ outta here. And—” He hesitates.

And make sure she’s all right, Eames fills in for him. Look her in the eye, in several different lights, at different times of day, and ensure that the glazed hollowness devouring Mal in the last months doesn’t appear. And if it does, _act_ , somehow, do _something_ , and damn the no-contact policy, despite convention and best practices and all the shit that doesn’t matter, really, when you get down to keeping a dreamer this side of sane. Eames shifts, lifts his head from the back cushions and then bows it over Arthur’s, chin just away from resting atop of Arthur’s head, because of the chance that Eames has misread and that Arthur’ll go all bristly, which is not to be borne at this juncture. “I’m not following any of the rules topside, I’ll warn you now,” he says, low; it could sound suggestive, if he had an iota of silliness available now.

Very softly, Arthur snorts. “Hell if _I_ am.” He shifts slightly—for anyone who weren’t Arthur, and perhaps for Arthur when he’s seven days deep in a dream at who-the-hell-knows in the morning, Eames would say he _nestles_ into Eames’s own shoulder, and rests his forehead against Eames’s jaw. Warmth settles in his stomach and sinks, a gratifying sort of weight. It could be merely dream side effects, the slide into casual physical closeness because it’s not really physicality, it’s minds seeking each other for comfort, but—well, again, the futility of lying to oneself. “You—take good care of her,” he adds.

“Well, you asked me to,” Eames replies. It feels like a confession.

Possibly it is, because Arthur huffs a warm breath against Eames’s shirt and murmurs, “Didn’t used to be that easy.”

“Didn’t used to be that important.” He doesn’t know if he’s talking about Ari anymore; he’s desperately short on sleep himself and it’s catching up to him, but Arthur is a solid weight against him and they’ll be topside soon and Eames is—exhausted, exhausted, but Arthur is here, and so it’s all right.

He loses track of time, drifting as he smooths Ari’s hair, memorizing the feel of Arthur relaxed and close and unguarded—mostly—in case it turns out this _is_ just dream side effects, although he thinks they’ve not-said rather too much for that to be right. They’re putting off _something_ until they’re topside; he knows that much.

When he wakes, hours later, Ari is still asleep and Arthur is gone, but he still rather feels it’s all right.


	2. an answer in you

It’s been eleven hours since they disembarked at LAX and Eames is nearly relaxed.

Some of that is because his H&K is a comfortable weight at his side and Saito is awake off being ridiculously wealthy somewhere, the glorious bloody-minded bastard, and Cobb is miles away with Miles—with photographic evidence, even—and the PASIV device is secured in his own hotel safe. That’s to throw off any poor sod who might have come to think Arthur holds it at all times. Arthur locked an identical metal case into _his_ hotel safe four blocks away, but it holds a winter-weight sweater padding two cheap watches, four paracetamol bottles filled with cement plugs for weight, and an otherwise blank Moleskine with GOTCHA written in neat block letters on the first page.

Some of his lightness of heart is because eleven hours have _passed_ with Fischer safely ensconced in a mansion—Eames watched the gates close behind his car, nine hours back—and there hasn’t been a peep from either his or Arthur’s networks in all that time.

And the majority of why he’s almost actually relaxed is that he’s sitting safe with Arthur and, against odds that he _still_ refuses to think of too closely, Ari, and they’ve each got their own brain in one piece and located where it should be. Ari has been snarky and clear-eyed and quick on the draw since they met up at eleven, and it’s too early to know for _certain_ , but those are all good signs now that they’re finally, _finally_ topside.

Furthermore, soon someone is going to bring Eames a beer in exchange for currency, because that is their job, which is simply wonderful in the way reality seems after a long dream or, perhaps, an acid trip. Sure, it’ll be a joke of an American pint; sometimes he really _does_ miss England, he muses aloud with only half his attention, while checking the games on the different TVs around this would-be sports bar—

—Arthur says, “Ari?” and Eames doesn’t freeze and doesn’t whip around in his seat away from the Turkey–Croatia football match he’s just fixed his eyes on, because he wasn’t born yesterday, for fuck’s sake, but he realizes, very quickly indeed, that _nearly relaxed_ was an absolute lie, because that’s Arthur’s point voice, and Eames is already scanning their exits and working out how to burgle his own room for the PASIV case and his go-bag as Arthur asks, low and urgent, “What’s up?” The H&K is loaded and close to hand and there’s glassware and silverware all around the place, decent as potential distractions or weapons or whatever he needs, to get Arthur out of here, and Ari—

Behind him, where he can’t see her, Ari replies pleasantly, “I have a question to ask Mr. Eames.”

Encouraging, Eames decides, as he settles on their three best routes. She wouldn’t be fucking around with characterization—that’s Ariadne’s intonation—or filler conversation if she’d spotted something serious. Although, _shit_ , she’s still green enough that she might not know what’s serious or—Eames twists himself back around toward the table and gets enough of a look at Arthur to confirm that he’s ratcheted right back up, all awareness and focus and tension. Silently he curses himself for twelve kinds of idiot, letting himself imagine for a _second_ that they might all actually survive this endless day. “What’s—”

Ari is holding her bag in her lap, a bright yellow wallet in one hand (Ariadne’s; good prop selection, he notes absently) and a pleasant little smile on her face. And, startlingly, a horrid splash of a bruise all over the inside of her elbow, a dark dot of a scab punctuating a field of brown- and green-dappled blue edged in red shading to violet. The bright June sun would have washed it out, and he’s still ready to _move_ but he spares a thread of attention to demand, “Hang on, little bird, what _did_ you do to your arm?”

“IV incident,” she answers airily, glancing at it and then, fleetingly, at Arthur, and Eames sees the line of Arthur’s mouth tighten further in his peripheral. “Pretty, right?” She smiles at Eames again, the small polite thing out of Ariadne’s wardrobe. “That’s not my question, though. Remember today’s date?”

Eames blinks at her as Arthur replies instantly, “June fifteenth.” His eyebrows are furrowed, and Eames has only _just_ gotten re-acquainted with how easily he laughs when he’s not thinking a dozen steps ahead, but despite the ragged jeans and the loose hair he’s back on the job, now, that quickly. Tight as a coiled spring, elbow on the back of his chair, hand near his own gun beneath his NIN shirt, and all business as he asks, not quite letting impatience into his tone, “What’s the problem?”

“Eames,” Ari says, pitched upward, and he blinks again at her. “Do you happen to remember my birthday?” _My_ being Ariadne’s, of course; her body language is all poise and her tone is gentle and nearly all Ari’s edges are rounded and smoothed, except that brittle crystalline note in her voice, which…

It’s an unexpected question, completely at odds with their spring-coiling response—and it clicks into place, for Eames, because Ari is smart enough that she _would_ recognize a threat, but they’ve only known her a few months, even with the _bloody_ week in the bloody bunker just this morning, and Arthur hasn’t yet acclimated to how Ari reacts to _non_ -threats. It still takes Eames a moment to dig up the right information, to recall that he’d fixed Ariadne’s birthdate as the sixteenth of June, and he’s so relieved it’s not a _problem_ that he turns to Arthur and says, “Darling, we could have a party!”

Ari-as-Ariadne notes agreeably that she’ll be turning twenty-one, and asks Eames to recall what _country_ they’re in, of all things, and Eames peers at her, wondering vaguely what on earth she’s playing at, but he’s paying far more attention to the way every line of Arthur’s torso suddenly loosens, how his spine curves and his chin tips up and he _smiles_ , slow as sunrise, the dimple to the left of his mouth coming out, tension melting out of him. Arthur looks at Eames and he _sees_ , exactly, the moment when Arthur confirms that Eames, however unnecessarily, has his six, the split-second softening around his eyes before he says to him, halfway to a laugh, “I’d say it was nice knowing you, but…”

The picture coalesces then, Ariadne Finch and the date and her birthday and region-based legalities, and Eames overacts his displeasure _enormously_ , widens his eyes and drops his jaw and murmurs, “Oh, _shit_ ,” because—well, of course it’s stupid, of course he should have been aware. But back in March, when he was putting together her papers for Miles, there’s simply no way he could have known he’d be wanting to get her thoroughly smashed in the bloody United States three months later. He _can’t_ rationally be upset with his own process, although it’s unfortunate for Ari, and lord, they _are_ going to survive the day.

Or at least through dinner.

Ari lays her cheek against the laminated placemat in front of her and dissolves into helpless laughter that seems entirely uncharacteristic—but then, Eames realizes he’s never seen her, Ari, _not_ Ariadne, just _laugh_. Not without irony or grim satisfaction or all that jagged cynicism she wears like an exoskeleton, the shield protecting the flame of justice and kindness at her core from external view. She gasps for air and _giggles_ and Arthur is grinning too and it’s bloody fantastic, and she collects herself in record time to order a soda when the waiter comes round.

Arthur nearly loses it when she asks, sweet as icing sugar, whether they serve Coke or Pepsi.

Knowing it’s the least he can do—such a silly thing, but he still can’t dredge up any actual distress; he’s simply too relieved—Eames offers apology after apology, and volunteers the contents of his suite’s minibar, and she tells him to shut up and shut up and finally, “No, fuck off. I mean, thank you, of _course_ , but fuck off,” and then helpfully recalls Vegas.

Because they’d planned that, hadn’t they, last night—bloody _hell_ —in the hallway of that absurd five-star hotel, he and Arthur trying too hard and maybe fooling Ari but no, she’d followed right along, hadn’t she. Playing normalcy to the hilt, the Arthur and Eames Show (guest-starring Shrimpy Rookie), to avoid thinking about the damn job. And now Cobb is _home_ , home with Miles and Marie and Philippa and James, and Saito has increased their payout by thirty percent and… it breaks over Eames, once they’ve outlined the logistics of the next few days, that it’s _over_.

Not the inception; that won’t be a sure thing for another couple weeks. Cobb getting home, though—

There’s no _getting_ about it. He’s home.

Cobb is home and Arthur is free.

And maybe it’s terribly selfish of Eames to set those at equal value, let alone even thinking of it in those terms, but over the last three years it turns out he’s forgotten what Arthur looks like when he isn’t carrying the weight of an entire bloody family. It’s a new little thrill every time he glances over, even— _especially_ now, after that scare, and finds Arthur looking like he did when they first ran into each other in the bizarre rarified world of dreamshare—dimples deep on both sides of his mouth, relaxed and easy and wearing a _t-shirt_. And shoving _cheeseburgers_ in his face, because he’s always had a black hole instead of a stomach, but once he started running point all that got smoothed away, like the hair and the smile—Arthur’s been playing his role for _years_.

But he’s not now. And he keeps catching Eames watching him and his eyes go sly and a little soft each time and it flutters in Eames’s chest, which is perfectly stupid, but in a pleasant sort of way that he’s not going to go and ruin now with a mental self-interrogation. Besides, it _proves_ something—he wasn’t imagining things in the bunker; it wasn’t just dream side effects and eroded psychological barriers; there’s _still_ — Well, anyway.

Ari is relaxed too, content, thoroughly herself in her electro-whatever shirt. She seems serenely unbothered by her dip into Limbo ( _Christ_ ) and the eight days in the bunker, even with the falling dreams, and that _spectacular_ bruise—and Eames is going to have to find out about that—as she picks at the remainder of a massive plate of cheese-smothered chips. He leans back in his seat, stretching, and says, “So, the rest of the evening? Little bird, come to mine? There’s still the hotel liquor—”

“I’m a law-abiding citizen, I’ll have you know,” she says sternly.

“You’re anything you’d like to be, I should think,” he murmurs as the waiter drops off the bill. “Ah, thank you—” He hands over one of his essentially legitimate credit cards and waves off Ari’s immediate protest. “You’ll cover for me sometime. Or you won’t.” He lets his smile broaden. “Pocket change, now, isn’t it? What d’you say, just films, hold the booze?”

“Arthur’s explosions and quips movies?”

“If I’ve the charm to lure him,” Eames says, as earnestly as he can manage, which turns out to be more than he expected. He keeps his eyes on Ari, but he sees Arthur, to his right, ball up a paper napkin and toss it at him. It bounces off his temple and lands on the floor.

“I wish you success in your endeavors,” replies Ari gravely, eyes flickering only briefly to follow the napkin. “But I think I could do with some quiet.”

He says, “I can be quiet,” simply to find out how Arthur reacts. The prat balls up another napkin, making _some_ kind of face—he can’t quite tell what—at Ari, who raises an eyebrow back.

“Second time in Zürich,” Arthur says, as he throws the ball. “Bogotá. Lima. Singapore. Florence. Delhi, all three times. Bangkok—”

The waiter drops off Eames’s card. As he scrawls the right signature (it’s got three different capital G’s, which he adores writing in this fellow’s hand) and as Arthur continues the litany of places where his natural gregariousness has, perhaps, caused plans to go a little pear-shaped, Eames glances up at Ari. She’s still smiling, but it’s going a bit fixed, so he cuts off Arthur’s recitation with a look and a minuscule jerk of his head toward her. “We can reminisce later, if we must. Little bird, shall we call you a cab?”

“Uh—” Ari straightens in her seat, settling back into the space behind her eyes—a terrible relief—and smiles again for real. “Nah, I’m set. The walk will be nice. Thanks for dinner. And the drinks offer.”

“Of _course_. Anytime. What about you?” He turns to Arthur and receives raised eyebrows. “Explosions and quips and liquor?” he says, light and inviting.

“Protocol. Laying low,” says Arthur reflexively, tonelessly, and then pulls a face at himself.

 _There you are_ , _darling_. Out loud, Eames replies, “Exactly. No one would imagine you’d voluntarily spend _more_ time in my company, isn’t that right?”

Arthur narrows his eyes, fighting a smile, and says, “A compelling point, Mr. Eames.”

They leave the restaurant together and wander along the first block—his own hotel is further up, a straight shot, while Ari’s is to the right, and they stop at the intersection, crowding right next to the curb to get out of the way of the other pedestrians. “Ari, you good?” Arthur asks, but Ari—she’s got her head turned away from him, and she’s looking across the street, unfocused. There’s tension around her eyes and mouth and shoulders; it’s all far too much like how she looked in the bunker, and Eames forces back the impulse to reach for her. Arthur’s eyebrows furrow as he repeats, “Ari?”

“I’m good,” she replies, shaking herself back into her head again, and grins up at Arthur, the least bit self-deprecating. “Really. I’m okay.” She adds, flippant, “Long day. You know how it is.” And, as simply as that, she flings one arm around Arthur’s waist and grabs Eames with the other, pulls him in for a loose-limbed hug. Which puts them right together, shoulder to shoulder—it’s the first time, Eames realizes with a slight shock, that they’ve _touched_ topside since Australia, and Arthur flicks a glance at him that says he’s realized as well, but Ari stands in the angle they form and Ari is _here_ ; it hits him again; it will never bloody _stop_ hitting him, how close it was—

Eames loops his arm over her and she bumps her forehead against his shoulder, like she had on the second-to-last night twelve hours ago, and Arthur’s face goes soft and unguarded for a beautiful moment as he hugs her back, and for a second his fingers brush Eames’s elbow.

And _she_ started it, Ari, who flinched away from Eames on the flight this very morning, eight days ago. “See you tomorrow, yeah?” she says to both of them. “Tell Miles I said hi.”

She’s midway across the crosswalk before Eames, keeping his shoulder against Arthur’s—why end a good thing, once it’s started?—mutters, “Tenner says she doesn’t sleep ’til the weekend.”

“No bet,” Arthur says, apparently automatically, because when the actual words catch up with him, he looks at him sharply and whacks Eames in the chest with the back of his hand.

“Twenty she lies and says she’s been sleeping perfectly fine, though,” Eames adds, tipping his head to one side, and Arthur opens his mouth to protest, but then hesitates. Which just goes to show. “See, we know our little bird.”

“ _You_ know her.”

“I’d say you’re her favorite,” he says, and Arthur is about to protest _again_ , despite that being perfectly obvious, so Eames cuts him off. “But we’ll both be around when she needs us.” And he surprises himself again, saying it that seriously.

Then again, it doesn’t do to leave a colleague out to sea, no matter who they are or how long they’ve been active, and Ari’s already a jewel. Which he’s noted a dozen times in the last months, but it’s never registered so forcefully as after the kicks back to the first level. She was close enough to bite off his nose and looked like she was honestly considering it, while Eames was still weak with relief that she was _there_. Half of being so hacked off that she and Yusuf had cooked up the bunker between them was simply the whiplash, between thinking _I’d rather die than know she’s lost_ and finding that, instead, she was two steps ahead and furious that he was holding up the line.

“If she needs us at all, that is,” he adds, offhand. “Or if you’ve got to be off, I’ll take care of her.” _And if she doesn’t need it, I’ll take care of you_ , he thinks, keeping his eyes on Arthur’s.

He goes briefly transparent, looking at Eames with undisguised wonder, which is—well, it is what it is. It’s not often that he goes about volunteering himself to watch out for dreamshare ducklings; Eames would be first to admit it. Arthur sighs through his nose, focusing. “She’ll be all right,” he says, which isn’t a formative reply, or even one Eames believes, because he remembers the aftermath of his own first two-hour-plus lucid dream, _and_ Arthur’s, and for that matter Dom’s and Mal’s.

Which merits distraction, Arthur apparently decides, because the next thing he says is, “Explosions. Alcohol.”

“Have you preferences on the latter?”

He thinks briefly, with that little frown, before pronouncing, “Scotch.”

“Done.”

***

The oddest thing about the long dreams is remembering them, Eames thinks. Lucidity grants them most of the qualities of topside memory, but there are _moments_ in them that leap out, the same way an image from a true dream will surface from a muddle of nothing, crystal-clear and arresting. In Eames’s hotel room, it’s like surfacing from a ducking in ice water, the contrast with how Arthur moved in the dream—precise, economical, even in the shelter of the bunker—as he simply flings himself in a tumble of limbs across about eighty per cent of the bed the wrong way around, head opposite the pillows.

Because they’re topside, and the chip in his pocket has its scored edges, they’re _safe_ here—as safe as they can be, between two murderous bastards with guns and prices on their heads in some number of countries—and thus, Arthur can move as he pleases, meaning extravagantly sloppily, all his point-running grace set aside. Eames had been hoping to at least put his feet up, but Arthur is faster, the arse, and when he’s not on the job— _like now, he’s not on the bloody job now_ —he is ruthless and tyrannical in commandeering however many acres of furniture he deems it necessary to occupy.

Besides, someone has to pour the scotch. Which Eames does, saying, “I know all the rationale for loosening up below, but the little bird—it seems to have stuck. Walls are down, at least for—well, us. Do you think so?”

“Mountain trolls,” Arthur says absently.

Eames pauses mid-pour. “Mountain _what_?”

There is a notable silence.

Eames sets down the bottle and turns back toward the bed, where Arthur is staring at the ceiling and looking somewhat pained. “Need I cut you off? I worry for your tolerance if one beer has you—”

“Fuck off,” mutters Arthur, and shuts his eyes. “It’s a—in the first Harry Potter book, and don’t start, okay, but there’s that one line, _things you can’t share without ending up friends, and one of them is knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll_. Okay? Shut the fuck up.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” he absolutely lies as he holds out one of the tumblers. Arthur takes it without opening his eyes, because even when he’s not on point he’s rather unnerving about tracking his surroundings. Thinking it over as he settles in the easy chair—mountain trolls may or may not be a reasonable metaphor for an eight-day dream strung up over Limbo; it really depends on whether the trolls are armed and how they take bullets; it’s not as if _he’s_ read the bloody books—Eames asks, “D’you think that’s it, though?”

Arthur sort of frowns, eyebrows going up, which is his way of shrugging when he’s horizontal and holding a glass. “Likely.”

Which is about as much as Eames will get on this line of inquiry. “That IV incident,” he says, and stops, because Arthur grimaces fantastically, levers himself up on one elbow, and swallows more whiskey at once than is economically wise. Eames likes the good stuff; it _can_ be drunk in shots, but it’s a terrible waste.

“That was… bad.” Arthur lies back again. “Another thing at Dana’s. The falls fucked her up—” He shoots a glare at Eames, upside-down, for the _I can’t imagine why_ that Eames really, _truly_ knows better than to say by now, although he’ll admit to thinking it quite loudly. When he’s satisfied that Eames really is keeping his mouth shut, he sighs and looks back at the ceiling. “She _looked_ all right—well, I mean, she looked like shit, but not… overwhelmingly. But—I fumbled her line and had to pick it up off her stomach, and that little touch—she loses it.” He tongues at his teeth, works his jaw. “I mean—gets as far away from me as she can, too fast, and that rips out the cannula—one of the sixteens, we had the whole saline setup. So she’s bleeding all over herself and _screaming_. And I told you, under, some of it was words, that was the psychotic rat bastard thing, and I think every other word was _fuck_ , but then it was just… She lost speech, just went down and started crying.” Arthur is still watching the ceiling, which is still simply swirled plaster, but he’s _seeing_ her and the blood, Eames can tell.

Which is—well, yes, because Ari swears and threatens and yells, but she does so with _control_ ; everything she does is with an iron grip, even in repose, even when ripping into someone (well, into Eames; he hasn’t exactly seen her go after anyone else, but then, he’s the only one who’s given her reason to). As she’d said in the limo on the way to Saito’s lake house— _it doesn’t matter what we’re doing, I have to have my shit together_ , bitter and matter-of-fact and without a hope that Eames would even try to understand, because why should he? And the idea of her dislodging a sixteen-gauge trying to get away from _Arthur_ , screaming until she can’t— _Christ_.

Carefully neutral, Eames asks, “What did you do?”

“Stood there,” replies Arthur, with a humorless little smirk twisting his mouth. “Like an idiot. Waited ’til she quieted and then got first aid. I had no fucking clue what else to—”

“That’s about right, I think,” says Eames. Arthur is, quite simply, terrible with that type of distress, the kind that comes from the gut and overrides all logic—probably because he can’t shoot it. If he’d approached Ari, she’d have only felt cornered, and her hindbrain had already decided he was a threat; it’d have only made the situation worse. Only being able to watch until she weathered it—not ideal, but as good as he could have done with himself. “She let you help? With the arm?”

“Kind of a trick if she got it fixed herself. Only had her non-dominant hand.”

Eames sighs, if only because Arthur is being deliberately tiresome. “But did she _let_ you?” he repeats. “There’s grudging acquiescence, and there’s _allowing_ , and you’d just—”

Quietly, still looking at the ceiling, Arthur interrupts, “She let me. She helped, held stuff, whatever. Tired herself out, I think. Practicality.”

“Don’t be thick,” says Eames.

Arthur looks at Eames then, finally, still upside-down, but the half-smile is unmistakable. He says, “On the second level I kissed her.”

He nearly drops his glass and quickly sets it on the end table. “And _I’m_ the one whose throat she was going to rip out?”

“She was gonna go for the eyes.”

“See, she _clearly_ prefers you,” Eames says triumphantly. “It’s not as if she’d told _me_ that—but _why_ did—how—Arthur, _really_?”

“Do I lie to you?” Not _would I_ , but _do I_ , which would be an interesting slip of the tongue if it were one. Arthur sits up and twists so he’s facing Eames, sips at his scotch, and raises his eyebrows, prompting an answer; Eames shakes his head and waves at him to keep going. “Really early on. The projections in the lobby were all focused on me, and she was freaking out, so I told her to kiss me. Did nothing, of course, so I played it like I’d been looking for an excuse to, and _that_ got her to laugh.” Arthur’s smile goes gentle, still lopsided. “I was trying to think what you’d do.”

“And you decided I’d have _snogged_ her?” He can’t tell if he’s horrified or delighted. Possibly both. “ _Really?_ ”

His sigh is explosive; he’s terribly overdramatic, Arthur, when he’s got time to be. “No, jackass. You’d have done something ridiculous,” says Arthur, “with, like, five layers, and at your expense, to get her out of her head, and fine, I only managed three. But I figured that was pretty good. Took longer to come up with than the second kick.”

Eames blinks at that—at the entire thing, really; at Arthur pinning him so well (helping Ari with her hair, after they surfaced—nearly surfaced—what was that, if not making himself slightly ridiculous?), at his _trying_ to emulate him. At the ploy itself. “And it worked,” he says, a little wonderingly.

“You don’t need to sound _that_ surprised,” Arthur drawls, but then he goes serious. “It—was a problem. So I solved it. Like the kick, later.”

That puts Eames back towards remembering… everything, down on the third, the bright cold space of the fortress and looking away as Ari told Cobb, _You know what needs to happen_ … and the PASIV device wheezing and knowing he and Saito were alone, with Mal’s body not five meters away and Saito on the way to Limbo— He shakes his head quickly and drains his glass.

Arthur is watching him, careful and calm and still, and when Eames puts his glass down, he says, “Explosions.”

“That’s _right_ —” Eames stands. “What cinematic masterpiece are we in for?”

***

The TV is on the wall opposite the bed, so Arthur rearranges himself and Eames finally, _finally_ puts his heels up. They keep the scotch close to hand, but Eames realizes some way through the film that neither of them has actually gone for a refill. It’s quite a good terrible movie, all sorts of one-liners and pyrotechnics, and Arthur has oozed most of the way horizontal when he says, apparently out of nowhere, “Ari thinks I have a shrine to Trent Reznor.”

“Do you?” asks Eames, a little vaguely, because the present chase scene is quite well-shot.

“In an apartment.” Arthur sounds somewhere between awed and disgusted. “Or a fucking _house_.”

Arthur has a twenty-five-square-foot storage unit in Anaheim. He’s had it since three days after Mal’s death, within six hours of a connection in the Pasadena PD having told him they were considering Cobb a suspect, and within four of having worked a trick or three to find out the (staggering) evidence against him. He and Eames had shifted everything to the unit from Arthur’s shite sublet the morning before the funeral.

And within the week, Cobb was on the run and Arthur was following. Eames signed Arthur’s rent checks for the remaining two months of the sublet, waiting and watching and listening in southern California, before a job came up in Stockholm. And that had been that.

“Well,” says Eames, shaking himself back to the present—where Arthur is prepared for all eventualities, with buffer funds and automatic payments and stashes of clothes and guns and IDs the world over, where Arthur has dressed like a particularly fastidious bank manager for the last three years, where Arthur is _free_ — “You do often look the type, darling.” He glances down at Arthur; his forehead is furrowed a little, but he doesn’t look upset, merely thoughtful.

“The type,” Arthur repeats, and looks over. Up. “What type?”

“The type to have—” He gestures broadly. “You know. Real estate interests. Leases. Things involving responsibility and great loads of paperwork.”

His laugh is a little dark. “So at least I _look_ like an adult.” And that sounds _very_ dark.

Eames is fairly sure they’re missing some important plot in the film—hostage negotiations, or something—but he doesn’t give a shit, not when Arthur sounds that—sounds _like that_. “Arthur,” he says, very seriously.

Arthur looks up at Eames properly then, frustration and exasperation with himself all over his face, with something else, softer, something like wistfulness, and he looks entirely his age and too young and far, far, _far_ too old, all at once. Eames is afraid of exactly what his own expression might be doing in response, so he quirks an eyebrow and drawls, “If you truly think less of yourself for not having done your last three years’ work out of somewhere semi-permanent—well, I know you’re a bit of an idiot, but not _that_ much.”

For an absolutely bloody terrifying moment, Arthur’s face tightens—and then he sighs and laughs, one dimple appearing. “Well, if you put it that way.” He sighs again and pulls himself slightly more upright. “Kind of dumb to think I gotta stick to the typical twentysomething goalposts.”

“You’ve been dancing in and out of people’s _dreams_ ,” Eames says, more than a little pointedly, “since you were a teenager; it’s _not_ dumb, because it’s _absurd_.”

“I do have the Reznor shrine, though,” says Arthur, looking into the middle distance in contemplation. “Or the stuff for it, anyway. In boxes. Poster tubes.”

“See, the little bird’s sharp that way.” Eames thinks. “Most ways, actually. D’you remember, debriefing, when she started going on about _rifles_ —”

“Was that before or after you rhapsodizing about her throwing together the Limbo thing?”

Eames feels a jolt of horror— _Christ_ , Limbo, Ari—and shakes his head quickly. “Darling,” he says, “if we could just—not talk about the Limbo thing—”

As if it’s nothing, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, as if it’s still the dream and they’re all looking for comfort wherever it can be found, Arthur tips sideways until the side of his face rests against Eames’s arm. An echo, again, of that second-to-last night, but topside. It doesn’t take much tipping, and then he sort of nudges at Eames’s shoulder with the top of his head. “No problem,” he says easily. “Ari with a rifle. I could see it.”

“It’s only—” Why can’t he stop talking? “The two of them, going under right there in the antechamber, with Saito dying and Fischer dead and _Mal_ —” Eames puts a hand over his own mouth, and it’s not enough; he drops it. “Coming _back_ from setting the charges and Saito’d died and being surrounded by corpses and soon-to-be—I had no earthly idea whether the kicks would even _translate_ , there’s no _precedent_ , there was just—just Limbo, and the last thing I said, d’you know the last thing I said, I said, _if you’re not back before the kick I am gone, with or without you,_ and Ari made this face just like you would—”

“Hey,” says Arthur, quietly, and pulls himself _actually_ upright, shifting so they’re shoulder-to-shoulder again.

“She _did_. This damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead _look_ like she was absolutely _determined_ to throw herself through hell and _then_ come _back_ and rip me a new one, and then they were under and I’d said—and there was no way—I thought I’d never—I could do _nothing_.”

“Hey.” Arthur’s hand is on the side of Eames’s face, very suddenly. He guides Eames to look at him, surprisingly gentle, and says, “You could. You did. If you really couldn’t have—” He pauses, shakes his head minutely, because what’s there is too big to say: if there were really _nothing_ Eames could have done, down on the third, they’d all be lost; Arthur would have followed Cobb down, without Ari’s report, and Eames would have followed _him_ and Yusuf would have been sent down by Fischer’s projections. Maybe they’d have woken by now, in that other-verse, but not a one of them would be sane, but for Saito—

Arthur quirks one eyebrow and presses his finger against Eames’s cheekbone, and Eames drags himself off that ledge to pay full attention as Arthur says, “I thought we weren’t talking about the Limbo thing.”

He looks very serious as he drops his hand back into his lap, very serious indeed, without looking stern or angry or impatient or any of the usual things, simply—present, and focused, and it is a great deal, Eames discovers anew, to be the sole object of that focus. “Apparently my mouth decided otherwise,” he says, trying to make it flippant. He sounds half-choked instead, and he attempts a smile, and then presses his eyes shut, because he can’t manage this while returning _that_ look. “ _Christ._ Below—the reason I signed on—” It’s as bright as if it happened five minutes ago, nearly going to pieces in the first hour in the bunker, Arthur gripping his shoulder and his nose nearly touching Eames’s ear. “—Knowing you’d be aboard,” Eames says now, topside, because they’ve survived and because Arthur is free and because there’s nothing left to lose but what precious little dignity he still possesses, “and knowing if it all went to hell I’d at least have—done all that I—I’d at _least_ have followed.”

There’s only his breathing, after he says it, ragged. His breathing and Arthur, still and silent.

Something explodes in the movie, whatever the hell is happening in it.

“You didn’t have to,” says Arthur, his voice small.

That is so blatantly, infuriatingly wrong that Eames _has_ to look at him. “Yes, I rather did,” he snaps, and then realizes what he’s said.

Arthur blinks, twice, and he _can’t_ be this thick, it’s simply impossible— “Shit,” he says.

An out, he needs to engineer an out, in case, if it’s not—there’s no taking back the admission, but there are ways out of acting on it, and—“We’re in a hell of an industry,” Eames replies, too casual, the tone’s entirely wrong—

Arthur does that thing where he doesn’t roll his eyes only because he’s trying to act like it’s not worth the effort, and it’s so entirely Arthur—point or otherwise—that Eames relaxes a little, and then Arthur kisses him.

It’s startling, the understanding—that Eames can know Arthur down to the last crease of his eyelids and yet there’s—this, new and already familiar and yet _not_ , all at once. Arthur is gentle and unhurried, his hand going to the back of Eames’s head, and Eames lets him work his mouth open and then there’s a little hurrying, a hitch in Arthur’s breathing. Eames brings his hand up to the line of Arthur’s jaw and feels the pulse point at the side of his throat, the softness of the skin just beneath his ear. Arthur licks along Eames’s lower lip, slow and careful, and pulls back just to return, and it’s bloody wonderful, and Eames hears himself make a half-noise in his throat—

Arthur stops and moves away, although not very far, and he asks, curious, “Who has _your_ six?”

“You’re rather my first choice,” Eames replies, only a little hoarse.

He swallows, visibly, and says, “I don’t know if—”

“ _Christ_ , Arthur—”

“No, shut up,” says Arthur, sharp, and then winces at himself and— _glory_ —kisses Eames's temple, quick and sweet, apology and affirmation. “I—you said. I’ve been doing—I’m Dom’s point, and I—I don’t know what happens after this, what it’ll be like. What _I’ll_ be like. I don’t—” He grasps for words and comes up short, shakes his head.

Eames is quite suddenly impatient. “Don’t be an idiot,” he says, but it comes out far gentler than he’d intended. “We’re not—I’m not looking to—to settle in the damn suburbs. I’ve a _career_.” Arthur _looks_ at him, sardonic, and Eames glares as best he can and hurries on. “But I’m—I’ve been—around, with you, or for you, or whichever prepositions you like, and I’ll keep being so. And there’s—” At a loss for words himself, which _does_ happen, however rarely, he simply ( _simply!_ ) presses a kiss against the corner of Arthur’s mouth, because he _can_ , and you can dream for a decade and it has nothing, absolutely nothing on reality. “There’s this. That’s all.”

“Oh, that’s _all_ ,” Arthur repeats, one eyebrow arching.

“There’s significantly more, really,” he says, with his own eyebrow maneuvering— _much_ more suggestive, of things that aren’t homicide, than any expression he’s seen on Arthur’s face in the last eight bloody years—“but I’m rather saving it for whenever you’ve realized that we’re _not—_ not working a bloody _problem_ here. Because there _isn’t one_.”

Arthur’s ear, the one he can see, goes pink, and Eames thrills. “You’re saying,” he drawls, because of course he does, “that you’ll still respect me in the morning. Which would be a fucking miracle,” Arthur continues, thoughtful, “considering how much respect you generally—”

“Darling,” says Eames, “if you’re quite finished…”

The grin, the _delight_ on Arthur’s face silences him; Arthur holds his eyes, steady and sure and warm as sunlight, and traces the line of Eames’s mouth with his thumb. “Never,” he says, halfway to a laugh.

“Well, good.” He’s not entirely certain what they’re talking about anymore, but he’s certain of Arthur—he’s always been, and now even more so, and who _needs_ dreams? “I’m not sure I’d know what—”

Arthur laughs then, for real, and says, “We’d figure it out.”

They would, Eames realizes; they would and they will, as they always have, and he laughs himself and pulls Arthur as close as he can and then closer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [CHAPTER CREEP: by the end of this part, Eames and Arthur will be caught up with the ptgp timeline. sorry it took ages; I wanted to get this right and life kept interfering.]


	3. yet I remain certain

Eames wakes, that first morning after inception in Los Angeles, to a paper note saying _CABBED TO HOTEL. BE READY 10:30_.

Approximately as expected, although he’d not gotten around to determining what, exactly, he’d expected until it happened.

They’d both been half-tipsy, jetlagged, and on the edge of twin adrenaline crashes, and that was _before_ they worked out the bit about kissing. After—Eames smirks at his reflection, which remains exactly his (a secondary totem), as he coaxes his hair to behave. The crashes had hit each of them, equally hard, about a third of the way toward—well, whatever direction.

Really, it was a marvel they’d managed getting Eames’s buttons undone and Arthur’s Nine Inch Nails shirt onto the floor before Eames started blinking into microsleep and Arthur turned his head into his bare shoulder to yawn, so wide his jaw cracked. Eames hadn’t even been able to laugh at him properly, only snicker like a child, as he’d wrestled with his shirt and the covers while Arthur got the TV and the light. He doesn’t remember falling asleep; the moments of awareness and half-dream are melted into each other, skin on skin and lazy, lax kisses, smooth crackling of the sheets and the hum of the air conditioner. But blinking awake, sometime far into the night, he’d stilled, and then marveled: the _rightness_ of Arthur, the boneless weight of him, asleep with his head on Eames’s shoulder.

And thought, clear as diamond, _Remember this, for when it's over_.

At ten-thirty precisely, Arthur picks him up in a rented tan hatchback, hair slicked again and wearing a button-up that hasn’t seen an iron in its life. When Eames gets into the passenger seat, holding the PASIV case (the real one), Arthur says, “You leave all your ugly shirts in Sydney?”

Eames looks at him as he does up his seatbelt. “Darling, that was nearly a compliment.”

Arthur doesn’t reply. Instead, he puts the car in gear and says, “Drink your coffee.”

And that’s any possibility of morning-after awkwardness dispensed with. Eames drinks his coffee as Arthur drives him and the PASIV device to the lovely midcentury house in Pasadena. They speak of small things, logistical matters: their combined intel on Fischer (quiet), where they’ll take Ari for Ariadne Finch’s birthday dinner, when Arthur is meeting his LA contacts, whether Eames should get in touch with his, and by which numbers. It’s easy, familiar and concrete; the previous night seems—irrelevant, in this light. There’s plenty to do to wind up a job, after the dream itself. And the odd giddy lightness in his chest—that’s simply a poor night’s sleep, for now, and no, he will not entertain thoughts of reaching for Arthur’s hand.

In an echo of dozens of prior visits, Arthur draws the car up at the curb, even with the easternmost trunk of the live oak in the Cobb house’s front yard. The déjà vu feels like hitting his funny bone, a sour sort of jolt, and Eames finishes his coffee in one swallow rather than commenting on it. He has a presentiment that Arthur might be thinking about breaking their tacit agreement on silence regarding the previous night, which would mess up the entire equilibrium of the visit—they can’t exactly have it out _now_ —and Eames says, just as Arthur drops his grip on the gearstick and opens his mouth, “Well, here we are.”

He means, _here I am_.

Arthur blinks and doesn’t quite smile. “Thank you, Mr. Eames, for your inimitable talent for stating the obvious.”

“ _Inimitable_ , darling, I quite like that—”

The PASIV device is relegated to an upper shelf of the coat closet within thirty seconds of getting in the Cobbs’ door, at which point Eames has James in his arms and Arthur is kneeling as Philippa gravely introduces him to the newly acquired (since Eames’s last visit in November) cat, a distinguished grey fellow named Chester. Dom, relaxed in a sky-colored polo shirt, drops to a crouch alongside Philippa and beams at her and Arthur and the cat, all three at once, his entire manner transformed utterly from that of the tight-lipped man who’d offered his passport for inspection at LAX the day before. “Phil told me how he got the name,” he says, “when she was learning the presidents.”

Philippa _glows_ , her smile as broad and free as Mal’s, as she says, “He’s Chester A. _Arthur_ ,” and laughs at her father, and behind them both, Stephen Miles grips Marie de Luce-Miles’s hand and nods to Eames, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Eames dips his chin, suddenly—awed, almost overwhelmed, at the enormity of what they’ve done, he and Arthur, and Ari, Yusuf, and Saito, and Cobb. Pulling this— _this_ family, its bits and pieces, the ice floes of Stephen and Marie and Cobb and the children and the ghost of Mal, catching them before they slipped through their own cracks, reestablishing at the _very_ damn least the _proximity_ necessary for healing, for growth—

Eames blows an enormous raspberry on James’s stomach to distract himself before that line of thought gets out of hand. When he looks up again, Arthur is watching, eyes squinted and soft, one side of his mouth tipped up, and as James shouts his laughter and demands _again_ , Arthur mouths, _There you are_.

That quiet assurance, reassurance, confidence and eight years of having each other’s six—that’s stronger, realer, than any sort of leftover will-we-won’t-we tension from an odd, emotional night that ended before it began.

He grins back, because where else would he be?

***

They celebrate Ariadne Finch’s twenty-first in quiet style, dinner and drinks at a beautiful jewel-box of a place that Eames would have been terrified to set foot in before he’d learned how to dress himself—a problem he can’t imagine Ari having, as either herself or the little bird. She’s dressed like Ariadne, silk blouse and dark jeans and high riding boots that shouldn’t work for the summer, but it does, because Ariadne would make it, with quiet confidence. Ariadne’s usual scarf is swapped for a sculptural silver-tone torque necklace that catches the light in curves, a trace of Ariette Vickers, but only to those who know the con.

After dessert, on the birthday girl’s orders, they embark on an ad-hoc bar crawl, beginning at the restaurant and ending at a quarter past two at the Omni, Ari waving them off through the lobby doors, tripping over her own boots. She looks simply incandescently happy, and Eames feels himself grinning like an idiot, stepping away from the doors and past with Arthur.

With Arthur.

It’s only them now, and something drops suddenly in Eames’s stomach. At this time last night, Arthur had been asleep in his bed, and it had been wonderful—in the most literal sense, full of wondering—and at this time _this_ night— Between the gentle chaos of the Cobbs and Ariadne Finch’s birthday dinner, they’ve not actually spoken to each other, _about_ each other, because it hasn’t ever seemed like the time for it, to Eames.

He’s not certain it ever will seem like the time for it. They’ve gone eight years without it being the time for it, and that includes yesterday.

In an echoing, hollow way that he refuses to analyze too closely, Eames acknowledges the fragility of yesterday, the eggshell frailty of— _whatever_ is between the two of them, and there’s _something_ , he knows that in the way he knows his totem, his name, the backs of his own hands. Yet how easy it would be, for Arthur—or for him, for that matter—to simply say _think I’ll cab it, goodnight,_ and they could part here, now, and never speak of this— _this,_ which he’s _not_ imagining—again.

They could go on working, interacting just as they have today, each putting on these little performances that only the other knows about, their dreamshare personas—

He darts a glance at Arthur, who’s digging for a cigarette (now, at this moment, off the job). Apparently without noticing the look, Arthur says, “Lemme—one sec.”

They draw to a stop at the next alleyway, leaning against the wall as Arthur finds his lighter—it will be a mystery forever, he thinks, how the man carries functional items on his person in trousers that fit that well—and Eames gets the tingling in his peripheral nerves that comes when standing at the edge of a steep drop. The mad urge to jump, destroy the possibility of falling by _leaping_ off and making no mistake of it—

He bites the inside of his cheek, once, hard enough to draw blood, and forces himself to look at Arthur properly.

Arthur, shoulders easy beneath the dark shirt he’d put on for dinner—it looks like velvet in the streetlight—is looking back, blowing out smoke. He dips his chin, a tiny motion, and holds Eames’s gaze as he says, like it’s nothing, “Walk back?”

That’s _not_ nothing, but it isn’t necessarily something, and Eames tongues at the tooth indentations on the inside of his mouth. “If we’re going the same way,” he says.

“Might be,” replies Arthur, just as casual, but he’s still watching Eames, and he lifts the cigarette again, and Eames wants to grab it out of his hand and kiss the smoke away.

“Give us a drag?” he says, instead.

Arthur breathes out, a sigh, and passes it over. One slim little cylinder, and their fingers brushing, and Eames—he holds them between thumb and forefinger—inhales and holds the smoke in his lungs and watches Arthur. “Where are you?” he says, quietly. It’s a line from working a problem, getting a bead on each other, and he holds out the cigarette.

This time, Arthur’s palm covers the back of his hand, intentional, before he takes it between his first two fingers. He just holds it, looking into space—his eyes flick around, like he’s looking over a diagram only he can see—before he says, “Considering.”

Eames waits.

“One approach over another,” Arthur adds, as if this clarifies anything.

“An approach.” Not quite a prompt.

He looks over, mouth quirked—sardonic, maybe a little self-deprecating. “Cards on the table, Mr. Eames?”

“You trust me at cards?” A stupid response to a stupid trite not-question, Eames is aware, but  _really_ , they could go on verbally dancing all night, and his feet are tired.

“Fuck off.” Immediate, but with no sting at all. “I’m trying to—” Arthur stops and shakes his head, like he’s trying to get something out of it. “I—if you—I’d— _fuck_ it.”

Eames waits, and watches.

Arthur collects himself, and says, dry as dust with one eyebrow lifted, “I’m working out exactly how bad dropping the line would be, if I’m wrong.”

“The line,” Eames repeats, again, which is against the rules, but _we’re not working a problem_ , he’d said; they'd _agreed_. “If you’re wrong on—” He’s not certain he’s got this right; if he’s reading Arthur wrong—he _doesn’t_ , but if he were to— He feels a little wild, and it’s not just the drinks or the hour or the sleep deprivation; it’s soul-deep. “Darling, are we both being morons?”

With surgical precision and laser-like focus, Arthur grinds out his cigarette, only half-smoked, on the wall, staring down at it between his fingers. When it’s down to ash and he’s an instant from smudging his fingers, he drops it, and watches it fall to the sidewalk, and then says, “There is a possibility,” clean and crisp, each word separated from the next by an inviolate crystalline silence, “that we are being morons. Having been smart for a—a while.”

Eames grabs his wrist, because he’s not a complete idiot, only partly one some of the time, and Arthur looks up, and Eames _isn’t_ an idiot, Arthur doesn’t go that molten in the eyes, unless it’s last night, or exactly like, and Eames demands, “What was the line?”

Arthur’s face goes still, solemn, and he swallows—Eames is close enough to hear it—before he says, so grimly Eames can barely parse the words, “‘Your place or mine.’”

After an insane whirling moment, he understands, and laughs wildly and drops Arthur’s wrist, covering his own mouth with his hand. “That’s _horrendous_.”

“And you’d have gone for it,” says Arthur, bland with surety.

“Who _wouldn’t_?”

Arthur grins, then, and jerks his head. “So, mine. C’mon.”

They walk—without speaking, without touching, each knowing without words that that’s what they both need, having established the bare minimum—that they’re acknowledging this, for now; that they’re together in it, for now. The streetlight gilds a nearly empty sidewalk—half two in the morning, on a Thursday, it’s no wonder. Eames feels hyperaware and hypersensitized, the skin on his fingertips nearly buzzing.

For years, whenever they’ve been on the same continent at the same time, he and Arthur have been in the same spaces and the same minds and the same patterns; they know each other to the last flick of an eyelid, down to the slightest change in posture. But there’s—there’s so _much_ more, he realizes, all over again; it’s like going under again, the rush of it, but instead of becoming more removed from reality it’s getting _closer_ , realer, the details glowing, new ones hiding in the light cast by this regard. And he doesn’t yet _know_ , not for sure, if Arthur sees that too, or if this is a lark of his, or—

He _thinks_ he believes it isn’t; yesterday, he’d been _certain_ , after all, at a cellular level, of the bedrock solidity of _this thing with Arthur_. In general, he trusts that instinctual—trust, which is tautological and ridiculous, but this ouroboros of certainty has to spit out its tail sometime, and why not start with trusting your own trust in the person who’s had your six for ages?

And at another level, he wonders, watches this new current tug things along, tracing the protean ghost of the new shape it’ll carve for itself and holding himself away, preserving—distance, a laughable idea of a work–life balance, the status quo.

Because the best way not to fall is not to jump in the first place.

Eames still feels at the edge of something, and he could still step away from it.

In his heart, in his guts—soul, whatever you’d like to call it—he’s really rather cowardly.

So he follows Arthur’s subtle guidance, tips of the head indicating which turning they take at crosswalks, and paces him, and thinks, and positively boils inside.

Arthur’s hotel isn’t far, maybe a mile, a reasonable walk on a mild night, and once inside the lobby, he bypasses the elevator banks without a second look, which—well, Eames can understand _that_. They go up two flights of stairs, the soles of Arthur’s spectator-detailed boots worn to silence, Eames’s derby shoes nearly as quiet. The hall of the third floor ( _not_ the fourth, or the fifth, thank Christ) has paisley carpeting and bland wallpaper, with a chair-rail border of the same pattern. Nothing like the second level of the dream, nothing at all, except that Arthur is in it, and Arthur runs his keycard at 335 and pushes the door open.

Eames doesn’t move, suddenly heavy. “Arthur,” he says, and it comes out ragged and unexpectedly urgent. “What are—”

Arthur stops at the threshold and looks at him, eyebrows quirked. “We’ll figure it out,” he replies, and he sounds like it’s just another question, absolutely confident in their combined ability to find an answer. “Look, just come in.” He shoves at the door; Eames steps in and lets it fall shut, and then there’s just the two of them again in near-darkness—there’s a bedside light on.

And silence.

The dimple comes out on the right side of Arthur’s mouth after a moment. “This was easier when I was drunker,” he says.

Eames laughs, once. “Are we working a problem? Now?”

“No,” replies Arthur immediately, and then again, that uncertainty, confusion. “Or I don’t want to be. Do you?”

“I want,” says Eames, and pauses, because he doesn’t know.

Last night could be a blip, and they could have a drink and a laugh now and Eames could go back to his own hotel, and they could keep working on different sides of the planet, pitching in on the same jobs every now and then, grabbing meals and scrubbing sites and visiting the Cobbs at non-overlapping intervals. They could. They have more than the capacity for it, and it’d be easy, familiar, comfortable—

—but yesterday had been easy, too, easier than he’d _hoped_ , if he’s allowing himself to admit that he’s hoped at all, which seems rather necessary—

“Hey,” says Arthur, and Eames shakes himself, focuses again: he is here, in Arthur’s hotel room, and Arthur wants him to be here, and does not want to be working a problem. Arthur’s eyes are soft, and he says, quiet and smiling again, “We’re still being morons.”

Eames blinks. “Having been very, very smart,” he replies, feeling his own smile beginning, “for rather a long while.” He closes the distance between them this time, steps forward and leans his forehead against Arthur’s, presses their noses together. “I feel we’ve earned a bit of idiocy.”

Arthur just tilts his head and kisses him, soft and precise, and Eames feels it like lighting, a bolt to his center. Without his conscious direction, his hands lift and settle on Arthur’s waist, the leather of his belt, and then skim over his shirt, press against his back. “We are,” he says, breathless, “absolute morons. And not a problem.”

“Not even close,” replies Arthur, as solemn as a judge, before he laughs, half-wild; he’s shaking beneath Eames’s hands, or Eames is trembling, or both. “Are we—on the same page?”

He has no idea, not the foggiest, but he orders, “ _Don’t_ tell me you’re thinking about paperwork,” and before Arthur can reply they’re kissing properly, _finally_ , and the sweetness, the _rightness_ of it is nearly more than he can bear, but he’ll bear it, gladly, for as long as Arthur will let him.

Later, Eames traces patterns, connecting the freckles dusted down Arthur’s back, and Arthur rolls and kisses him and Eames thinks, a little deliriously, of fractals, the ways in which you can know a person, the infinite loveliness of them beneath your fingers. It’s impossible, that curling level of detail, and yet of _course_ it exists, for them, this additional dimension, a pocket universe comprising only and exactly each other, pristine and untouched by the rest of reality. Each new piece— _every_ piece, regardless of age, transformed simply by this—this elaboration, the closeness and the light of it, the intensity. A Mandelbrot set of wonder, beneath his hands, the two of them through the years just by each other’s side, and this _discovery_ only just now, and he can’t even think of it as a waste, because glory, they have nothing but time now, or they could—

***

Jet lag hits them both in the way it couldn’t on their first night, like a curtain falling, and they only wake sometime near noon, a bare half-hour before Arthur is supposed to meet with the girl he’d hired to keep an eye on the Fischer estate (a placement on house staff, or something; Eames didn’t bother to know the details). Arthur flings himself to rights—fortunate that it’s his hotel, really—and, simultaneously, they deal with their paperwork, getting on the same page, all that. Which is to say they talk out… this, each other, the new thing. For instance, they establish that they’re mutually disinterested in public declarations, for the foreseeable.

“Poor decision considering the business,” says Arthur, and winces almost immediately. “Shit, I mean—”

“No, I quite agree,” says Eames peaceably, through a yawn. “I’m a _terrible_ business decision.”

Arthur fixes his tie, steps back to the bed, and kisses Eames’s cheek. “I don’t make terrible business decisions,” he says.

“First time for everything, darling,” Eames drawls, and Arthur doesn’t quite roll his eyes as he leaves.

Really, there’s a mountain of reasons not to discuss it publicly. Never offer leverage, never show your hand, play whatever game you like but keep the real things as close as your gun—simply best practices. Besides, relationships—capital-R ones, which Eames isn’t even entirely sure they’re _in_ —just don’t fit with their dreamshare personas. Neither Arthur nor Eames is known for letting anything or anyone stick, with the major exception of the Cobbs for Arthur. Otherwise, he’s too focused on the job. Eames, meanwhile, is too slippery to pin, or at least, the Eames that the business knows is.

Which is at it is.

For now, Eames goes back to sleep in Arthur’s bed, content.

Some time later, Arthur lets the door drop shut a little too hard and says, “Lazy-ass.” Eames might respond using human language, but he’s not certain, but also, it doesn’t matter, because in moments Arthur is nestled in next to him, dropping kisses along his forehead and nose and then his mouth. Then neither language nor time matters, because it’s their universe of each other, right here, and there’s so _much_ to find out in it.

***

On Friday, they pick up Ari at the Omni, en route to Vegas. She hasn’t slept; it’s as obvious as the little button nose on her face. Eames watches her, lets her know he sees, suggests that perhaps she might want to discuss it. Almost exactly as he expects, she rebuffs his concern, smooth and snarky and not nearly as sharp as he knows she could be. Once they’ve checked into their hotel (three separate rooms, although he isn’t particularly anticipating spending much time in his—Arthur’s is far nicer), Ari goes off to the shops and he and Arthur settle at the corner table of a nearby bar.

“You’d owe me twenty,” says Eames, “if you were a betting man.”

“I saw,” replies Arthur. He’s somewhere between point and off the job, wearing a merlot-colored Oxford with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, open at the neck. “Talk it out. Tomorrow?”

“If she needs it. Evaluate at breakfast, perhaps.”

Arthur nods, and then blinks, and says, “Will—” And stops. He drops his eyes to his water glass.

Eames shifts, resting his chin on his hand. “ _Should_ we?”

One of Arthur’s eyebrows lifts. “It’s not strictly relevant,” he says.

“Darling, I consider you _quite_ relevant,” says Eames, for the sake of the not-roll of Arthur’s eyes, and then adds, “But you’re also quite right; it isn’t.”

He’s _very_ glad they’ve gotten this good at conversation without requiring all those stupid words, because the ones here would sound salacious indeed to any eavesdroppers. If Ari’s still not sleeping, it’s night terrors or unreality doing her in, and the only thing that actually bloody works safely is another physical presence around to tell her she’s awake, topside, someone providing whatever assurances she needs. Which means one or both of them kipping down with her, which rather interferes with other possible social activities generally performed overnight, which Eames _can’t_ bring himself to regret because it’s Ari’s head and its contents they’ll be safeguarding (or trying to), and besides, he’s got _time_. He and Arthur— _they_ have time.

So truly the question is whether it would be worth making Ari aware that she would be, to put it bluntly, cockblocking her colleagues. And that isn’t a question at all, especially when Eames is fairly certain that neither he nor Arthur would have any interest in fucking about (in any sense of the phrase) while someone suffered needlessly. Particularly if that someone were their little bird.

That gives him pause. _Their_ little bird. This intensity of protective instinct, the particular edginess of this post-dream wrap-up week. Eames walks his poker chip across his knuckles and back, rubs his thumb along its chipped edge, while Arthur sips water and thumbs through messages on his main phone. Eames is _not_ used to getting like this, especially not about rookies.

But Ari is exceptional. Worth her weight in bloody plutonium, with the skills she’s got already and all that untapped potential. It’s a business investment, is what it is. It’s ensuring that a mad little architect might—

—shriek at him about the unfairness of wet underwear in someone else’s dreams, having bent physics and the mind itself to her will and still swearing the air blue—

He knows, even in his own thoughts, when to concede a bloody point. It’s personal, Ari’s wellbeing, and Eames has no idea how to address _that_ , so he doesn’t, aside from vowing that he will see her through the aftermath of this first job of hers, no matter the level of social inconvenience.

Besides, he and Arthur have time.

“It’ll be enough,” Arthur says, setting down his phone and folding his hands on the table, “just—convincing her. Without disincentives.”

“You think?” says Eames. He’d give him a hard time about their whatever-it-is being a _disincentive_ , except he knows better. “After Dana’s?”

Arthur’s eyebrows lift as he examines his own fingernails. “I bent first, then,” he says, and flicks one look up at Eames, just for an instant. “Different balance.”

Eames tips his head. _Her suggestion_ , Arthur had said; _had to check my die_. That does rather change the picture, Ari being in the position of offering help rather than admitting weakness. And up here isn’t like it was in the bunker, where they and their minds were all in one room, all on top of each other; she has time to put up her shields, now. Ari, independent and professional. Eames sighs. “We’re well in for it.”

Arthur half-smiles and half-shrugs as he mutters, “As usual.”

***

That night is fast and glittering and lovely, dinner and then the Venetian, which is as ridiculous as always. Arthur puts on his poker face, which looks nothing like his point face (which people often misguidedly call _a_ poker face, but then, they don’t know him); Eames floats around the tables. Ari, startlingly striking—but why _startling?_ —in a silky pine-green dress and T-strap heels with her hair in a neat twist, wanders between them, seeming mildly yet charmingly bewildered at the number of people asking to buy her drinks. She only says yes to the girls, which is sweet to see. Eames shakes off the newness of it _relatively_ quickly, considering; it makes sense, doesn’t it, that a twenty-six-year-old woman in possession of a small fortune looks _that_ good in _those_ clothes. It’s simply a question of context, again, and how Eames had never thought to consider this one.

Well, it’s been a strange four months, again. When they leave her in the elevator up to the sixth (“Nightcap?” Eames says to both of them, and Arthur looks put-upon and acquiesces, and Ari says cheerfully, “Have fun, boys”) she’s unfastening one of her heels with one hand and raking pins out of her hair with the other. She looks happy and tired and a little glamor-dazzled, exactly like a girl after a few free drinks on her first night in Las Vegas. All as it should be.

And even more as it should be—strangely, newly, however many adverbs one wishes to apply to it—is the moment Eames strolls through the door of Arthur’s suite and finds himself grabbed firmly by the necktie. Arthur shoves the door shut with his spare hand and Eames into the wall with the rest of himself, muttering on a dark curl of a laugh, “ _Nightcap_ —you’re such a _fucking_ cliché—” right against Eames’s mouth, and Eames might be a little breathless when he laughs back because, really, how can he not be? With Arthur’s hips under his hands and Arthur’s fingers at his throat and Arthur’s lips on his, and Eames grips a little too tight because if this isn’t reality it’ll slip right away—

But it is reality, because he remembers exactly how he got here, in hours and days and bloody years, and _here_ is between a wall and Arthur, who pulls apart Eames’s tie knot and leans just far enough away to say in wonder, “What were we _doing_ before this?”

Eames breathes too hard and looks at him, at the gleam of his eyes, and lifts one hand to touch, so lightly, the dimple to the left of his mouth. “What we could,” he says, even though it’s obvious, because they’re _not_ working this, _them_ , as a _problem_ , it’s—antithetical to everything about them; maybe they haven’t talked _properly_ about this but they _know_ that much, at _least_ —and Arthur laughs freely, _delightedly_ , eyes going soft and molten at once, and Eames pulls him back close, mussing his hair and mouthing at the spot beneath his ear and down along his throat until the laughter turns into an altogether different sound. Arthur loses his patience then—again—and drags him to the bed.

Later, he’s about to flip off the bedside light when Arthur curls over behind him, one arm over his waist, face pressed to his shoulder. In LA, there’d been plenty of that, of course, but generally Eames only remembers passing out and waking up, between the time change and the jet lag and the variously sourced adrenaline crashes. This feels—purposeful, like the beginning of a routine, and Eames says quietly, “Didn’t figure you for a big spoon.”

“Fight me about it,” replies Arthur, muffled, and yawns right in his ear.

“Why on earth would I do that?” he mutters, and flips off the light, and when he feels Arthur drop a kiss on his shoulder, he smiles to himself, simply _absurdly_ happy.

***

In the morning, Ari looks like death warmed over. Not unexpectedly, but the _extent_ of it, the pallor and the dark creases beneath her eyes and the slight shake of her hands as she picks up the menu for breakfast—Eames offers a silent apology, to her and Arthur both, before he demands to know whether she slept at all.

She’s all glaring defensiveness; like Arthur, really, in her absolute refusal to admit what she sees as weakness, and Eames has the feeling Arthur sees it too, not least because he’s going so easy on her—he’s snapped at colleagues before, especially after Mal. But it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that the two of them, Ari and Arthur, have a kinship born of shouldering through nightmares together, figurative and literal. And they’re so _like_ each other, stubbornly independent and too brilliant for words and _kind_ , reading what isn’t said and filling in for each other, each skating over the other’s armor but never getting too close, instinctive and immediate.

Arthur doesn’t _make_ that kind of friend.

Eames can’t tell if he realizes he _has_ , yet.

Regardless, he and Arthur both reference their respective archives of dreamshare horror stories until Ari agrees, finally, that she’ll be in touch that night if she can’t get to sleep. The relief on Arthur’s face is plain enough that Eames takes it on himself to outline their (extremely loose) itinerary, just to give him time to compose himself.

It’s a nice day, crowded and colorful and overly air-conditioned, and none of them on either guard or edge—no more than usual for a day off, that is. Nightfall—late and sudden, the way it gets in the desert—finds them in the Bellagio, Eames in his favorite suit and Arthur in a new one (he’d gone off on his own while Eames and Ari spent far too long in one of the art galleries). Ari’s dress is ultramarine with structured shoulders and a keyhole back, her makeup impeccable. To look at her, you’d think she were a fabulously well-rested socialite; there’s not a trace of the criminal polymath who hasn’t slept properly in a week.

And at six minutes after three in the morning, fifty-eight minutes after they left her in the elevator, she’s tripping across the threshold of Arthur’s hotel room, wearing navy plaid trousers and a grey sweatshirt and carrying herself like her heart’s a bomb in a glass ribcage. She starts shaking the moment Eames catches her and she doesn’t stop until she’s got reason to yell at him again, but he’s too relieved to see _her_ beneath the terror that he can’t bring himself to mind the shouting. When Arthur loses his patience, which takes far longer than Eames had expected—he must be _terribly_ fond—it knocks Ari off her feet, almost literally, and Eames catches her again and holds her up until he can pass her to Arthur and go down two floors to his (nominal) room. He changes into nightclothes, the kind that are decent enough for runs down to the concierge if necessary, and fetches what he needs to camp out comfortably through the night terrors. A book, for one. Extra bottles of water, just in case—of what? _In case_ , he tells himself irritably.

He makes himself stop moving at that, in the middle of his room. He sets down the two bottles of water and the book and stretches his hands, spreading his fingers and staring at them until he sees they’re steady and still. It was a shock, Ari being that bad, that—well, _he’s_ never seen her that close to losing the plot; before, she’d always retained enough presence of mind to threaten him with untold horrors. And it’s _worth_ being shocked, Eames thinks, to keep his _friend_ in this plane of reality. If that’s what it takes.

And it seems as if it will, so he breathes, and swallows, and picks up his book—he leaves the water; he can go to the concierge, after all—and heads back up.

They’re sitting on the edge of the bed, backs to the door, Arthur folded around Ari like he can protect her mind by holding her in place, his chin on the top of her head. Each all pale skin and dark hair, angles and curves and tension, the black of Ari’s tank top against Arthur’s dove-grey shirt—they're a picture, the pair of them. Arthur glances up at Eames, eyes soft and sad, and pats Ari’s shoulder before he stands. His shoulder brushes Eames’s as he passes on his way to the bathroom, as real as a kiss, between them.

Ari looks—well, bloody awful, but she seems calm, significantly more than she’s been since she appeared. And _tired_ , finally, not terrified or furious, simply exhausted, as she twists to blink owlishly at Eames. He takes advantage of the stillness to tell her what’s what, gets her tucked in before she can start objecting. Ari shoves her totem beneath her pillow—something silvery, about the length of her palm, and gone too quickly for him to tell more, which is just as well—and mutters balefully about psychosis. Eames snips back, offering just enough verbal resistance for her to run up against, as he sits and pets her hair, holding his book in his lap, and waits. She _doesn’t_ reply, lets him win the fake argument, simply lies still, which is enough of a status update. The tension in her muscles doesn’t do anything so spontaneous as melt away. Instead, she eases by millimeters, like she’s coaching herself through it.

She probably is, at that.

She’s let herself close her eyes by the time Arthur gets back, shirt and tie and trousers swapped for t-shirt and sweats; he, too, looks truly tired, which makes sense, considering the—well, it’s not as though they’d slept terribly much the previous night. Or in the previous week, if Eames is to be honest, and he might as well, hadn’t he? He lets himself look at Arthur, the smooth line of his throat, the easy set of his shoulders, and doesn’t quite startle when Arthur says, “You’re staying up?” There’s a smirk pulling the corner of his mouth.

“’Til I’m done reading for the night, I figured,” replies Eames, lifting his book, as if he needs a prop, because—well, it’s _new_ , simply, being able to be caught admiring, and one can’t _always_ be ready. Arthur arches one eyebrow, the tiniest fraction, and Eames arches one back, and they nearly smile.

Arthur gets under the covers on Ari’s other side and fits himself right back around her—as a big spoon, Eames is amused to see, one arm around her waist. He looks up at Eames, eyes narrowed, like he’s daring him to laugh, and then murmurs something, checking on Ari.

She doesn’t move as she answers, although she pitches her voice a little louder. “I’m okay. And shut up, all right?”

A smile curves Arthur’s mouth as he replies, “Shutting up.”

It’s far from a pleasant night, but it isn’t nearly so bad as some. Eames reads fifty pages of a decent thriller, gets kicked more times than he can count, and learns that Ari somehow occupies _absurd_ mattress acreage, for a creature her size. Arthur gets an elbow to the diaphragm and once, barely conscious, pins a thrashing Ari, only moving his arm off her throat when he opens his eyes fully, but by that point she’s stilled and started spilling apologies. Then Arthur realizes he’s nearly strangled her, and _he_ starts apologizing, and Eames finally shoves Arthur off-balance, flings an arm over Ari, and snaps, “ _Shut_ it, both of you, _please_.”

He’s rather surprised when Ari simply twists onto her stomach, pats Arthur’s arm, and settles, and even more surprised when Arthur casts him a look of desperate gratitude before flipping his pillow and lying down again.

***

Sometime long after dawn, Eames blinks awake to find Ari limp, deep in delta sleep, lying on her stomach with her hand under her pillow. Arthur is sitting up, leaning against the headboard; when Eames lifts his head, he says in a whisper, just audible above the air-conditioning, “We’re not fucking her up.”

“That a bet or a fact?” Eames replies in the same tone. He’d much prefer _prognosticating or positivity_ , but it’s got too many sibilants; they’d do that obnoxious whistling thing, and he’s not going to risk bothering Ari’s sleep.

Arthur simply looks at him, and then closes his eyes, rests his head against the wall.

Unless he knows the game’s rigged—hell, unless he’s done the rigging himself—Arthur doesn’t bet.

But this is, by its nature, a bet.

They both know—they’ve done this too many times not to—that the majority of it is up to Ari herself. And that’s not even _true_ ; it isn’t a matter of anything so simply and vaguely and _infuriatingly_ described as _ability_ or _will_ or _strength_. It’s up to her neurochemistry, the bits of neural firings that determine whether she’ll find _reality_ and stick to it, cement herself in place topside, wake up the part of her subconscious that feels as if it’s never stopped falling. Mal never stopped living in Limbo, regardless of where she was topside, and that wasn’t because she was weak or incapable or unwilling—it was the shite luck of a shite draw, and that’s all.

They can be here for Ari, as mooring posts and get-a-grip reminders, as hard as they possibly can, and it might not be enough, and that’s the simple fact of it.

Eames levers himself up, careful not to disturb Ari, and reaches across her to rest his hand on Arthur’s forehead, smoothing his thumb over the crease between his eyebrows. Arthur’s eyes snap open and find his, and after a moment, he smiles, a hard-won thing. “What were we doing?” he breathes, and answers himself immediately. “What we could.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I chapter-crept again. not even sorry.)


	4. so long sometimes

“July twenty-first,” says Arthur, as Eames gets Ari’s bags out of the trunk of the black sedan. They’re at the civil airport, a hundred feet off from the jet Saito’s chartered for her to Ontario. Saito’s people had offered, the previous evening, to send a car to the hotel, but she’d demurred in favor of saying she’d have Arthur do it. They’d been about half a minute from getting a table for dinner and Arthur spent all thirty-two seconds trying to look hard-pressed instead of pleased. “I’ll send the itinerary—”

He’s cut off by Ari saying, “Oh, whatever. Don’t think I’m not gonna text you.” She turns to Eames and adds sternly, “You too, Mr. Eames.”

“I depend on it, little bird.” They had gone out once more after dinner, Ari in a one-shouldered silky rose gold sheath and Arthur with a champagne-colored brocade waistcoat. Eames wore black-on-black and pretended he was their bodyguard. At half one they’d gotten back to the hotel; within twenty minutes they’d convened in Arthur’s suite, all in sleeping clothes, Ari’s bluster all gone and leaving her pragmatic and rueful. A quieter night; not silent, but better, with no semiconscious attacks worse than a few kicks to the thigh. Now, Eames knows he’s pressing his luck, but he still says, “And perhaps updates on—”

“That’d be ideal,” says Arthur, glancing at Eames with _thank you_ in his eyes. “Unless you—”

“Sure, of course.” Ari nods like it’s nothing, and hugs them both like _that’s_ nothing, and then she’s up into the Cessna and off to her family in Ontario.

They drive back to LA that afternoon, because Eames’s flight back to Sydney is scheduled for late Tuesday. Another visit with the Cobbs, and a night in a Pasadena hotel. They both crash, wordlessly, when they get in just after dinner; it was a _good_ weekend, but not a restful one.

Eames awakens sometime late in the night, and while he’s as careful as he knows how to be when he moves, Arthur rouses and mutters at him, as if offended, “Where are you even _going?_ ”

It’s a quarter ’til four, says his phone; he sets it down. “Nowhere at all,” says Eames, easing back onto the mattress. “Apologies, darling; go back to sleep.”

Arthur, propped up on one elbow, says, “That’s a possibility.”

“I try to stay realistic,” Eames replies.

He snorts. “You do not.” And he shifts until he’s lying against Eames from shoulder to knee, sleep-warm; he murmurs, “You wouldn’t know realistic if it hit you in the face,” and presses his mouth to a spot beneath Eames’s ear, arm slung across his hips.

There’s no hurry at all in how Arthur is moving, and Eames really should have a clever rejoinder, but—well.

***

Quite a bit later in her own time zone, Ari texts them from her burner phone. _woke up like 10 times but all OK_. Arthur replies _Good to hear._ Eames sends _morning sunshine x_ , sets his phone on the nightstand, and wraps himself back around Arthur. Arthur grumbles, “You’re like a goddamn octopus,” but twists in his arms until they can kiss, and he smiles into it, slow and easy.

And then less slow, as the sun rises.

Neither of them, at any point, not even at when the rental is drawn up outside departures at LAX near eight o’clock that night, speaks of parting, of what it _means_ , of what they’ll do when they’re in the same city again. Eames can’t tell if he’s grateful or annoyed or concerned, and Arthur only glances at his mouth and then hauls Eames’s suitcase out of the trunk, unnecessarily, and says, half-smiling, “Safe travels, Mr. Eames,” and Eames rather wants to say _sod the flight_ and kiss Arthur right here at the curb, _let’s go anywhere, darling, anywhere at all—_

He doesn’t, of course.

He flies to Sydney and scrubs Eric Amesbury-Scott’s flat over the course of one jetlagged week in which both time and his spinal cord feel oddly squishy, when they’re not stretchy, or both simultaneously. At the tail end of it, he visits Dana; he hadn’t worked out any way to fit her into Amesbury-Scott’s story, and it’d be shameful to go four months on the continent without seeing her.

The first thing he does on parking his rental is hand over the archival Dior gown he’d found on consignment, dripping with icy silver beads—it can’t replace the Givenchy, but it’s a large step in the general direction of putting the entire Dnipro incident right. They drink and gossip and, to Eames’s slight surprise, talk about Ari—Dana is taken with the little bird, wants to know how she got on with field work in her first proper job. “After she shot Arthur in my yard and all— _oh_ , I wanted to go and play, but that fucking deadline—”

“You’ll have your chance. I think.”

“She’s on the forums, I know that much,” Dana replies, narrowing her eyes over her gin and tonic. “Lurking, at the _very_ least. You should’ve seen the look on Arthur—she started reciting my CV at me. _Not_ the publicly credited one.”

Eames snorts. “It’s like that with her, yes.”

The little bird herself texts on his second night at Dana’s, saying _slept 8h fuckers!!! no wakeups!!!_ Which is a weight off, at least for now. Yusuf calls the next morning with a line on a job—Ankara, with an old mutual friend—and Eames sets off.

Throughout, he exchanges texts with Arthur, along the same logistical lines they’ve followed for years in cleaning up after a job. The one deviation is after Ari sleeps through the night; Arthur texts Eames _We didn’t fuck her up_ , and Eames replies _dont undersell x_.

The Ankara job is a milk run, if there are milk runs in extraction, and Eames rather thinks there are. Evidence for this, thoughts on that, and it’s a personal commission, not a corporate thing, so the stakes are low; no one’s got a private militia on hire. Yusuf’s only involved because the mark has some wonky prescription history; otherwise, he’s a guard, not entering the field. Eames preps two forges in two weeks, swapping texts with Arthur— _bloody weather_ and _hows president cat?_ and _Miles is going back to Paris in mid-August_ and no reply when Eames asks what Arthur thinks about that, not that he expects one. He watches their extractor, Zumra, filter data and refine the storyline until she’s ready. They go under, he softens up the mark, she gets the data, they come up, Yusuf gets them out, Eames hands the data off to the client, the money arrives, and they’re off, short-term rental apartment scrubbed.

Off to Paris, he and Yusuf both, as somehow a month has passed and it’s that time in July. Past, in fact; they land at CDG at midday on the twenty-second ( _is that rite x_ ; two hours later, _You were there when I said July 21;_ _well fashionably l8 then x_ ; four hours after, _For once doing something with style_ , which Eames had—with _great_ restraint—left unanswered). They take a leisurely lunch before heading to the warehouse, where Ari springs up from her seat at Dom’s old desk. She’s wearing crap jeans and a t-shirt for some band, and she promptly hugs him one-armed (too quickly for him to be properly surprised) as she demands of Yusuf, “How’d Ankara go? Get the story?” Yusuf splutters about confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements until he runs out of steam, round-eyed with shock; she smiles angelically. “I’m on all the forums, dude, I told you.”

Yusuf replies, “I’m still _used_ to you being—” before he stops himself, as Ari arches a decidedly Arthurian eyebrow. “I’ll not finish that sentence, shall I? Where’s our point?”

Which is what Eames would like to know. He grins at Ari to hide it.

“Dunno. He just said ‘logistics’ because he’s a cryptic jackass. _Everything_ is logistics this week.” Ari settles back at Dom’s desk and goes back to the laptop there, looking peevish. It’s hot in the warehouse, this late in the afternoon and all full of sunlight. “Yusuf, you’re doing your lab—”

“Because no one else wants to touch it, I imagine.”

“If you need anything for, like, hazmat disposal—”

“Already settled,” says Yusuf. “Dig me out in time for dinner, yeah?” And he vanishes into his galley of a makeshift lab.

Ari looks up at Eames. “Did I say it’s good to see you?”

“You’ve been busy terrifying Yusuf.”

“I was _not_ terrified,” Yusuf calls, indignant.

“Sure you weren’t,” Ari calls back, and then says to Eames, “Your office first—keep what you want, at your discretion. Then I think get shredding on Cobb’s shit.” She points at a filing cabinet, then toward the middle of the warehouse, the ragged circle of lawn chairs; at the utility table that held the PASIV, there’s an executive paper shredder. “Clear?”

“Perfectly, little bird,” says Eames.

Ari smiles to herself, a tiny fond little thing, and mutters, “Fuck, I got _used_ to that.”

Eames relaxes, dropping the last of the tension he’s almost forgotten he’s been carrying. That’s _Ari,_ here, topside, in the warehouse—all Ariadne’s fussiness and careful circumscription and wardrobe cast off, and all of the post-job tension leached away, leaving Ariette Vickers, sublimely herself. The smile is when he _knows_ they’ve got her, that she’s safe from Limbo. He can’t explain how, but he’d swear to it.

He can’t wait to tell Arthur.

Of course, that rather requires Arthur’s presence.

Eames is halfway through his own files of Browning-related ephemera—he has a _system_ , just not one immediately comprehensible to the boring—when the main door eases closed on its fancy airbrake. “Yusuf,” says Arthur, on the other side of the dividers.

“Cheers,” replies Yusuf affably. “All going well?”

“Well enough.” There’s a smile in Arthur’s voice, and a moment later he’s saying from behind Eames, dry as dust, “Punctual as always, Mr. Eames.”

Eames replies without turning, “I _did_ text, darling.”

“You did,” says Arthur on a sigh.

His boots scrape softly away from the doorway.

Sometime around eight, Ari orders pizza; they don’t eat together, just grab slices and get back to their spaces, quiet until sunset—which is late _,_ near ten o’clock. “I’m _knackered_ ,” Yusuf says, stretching. “Time change crept up on me. ’Night, all.”

Ari does something on a laptop—not Dom’s; she’s moved on from his to the one Saito used at intervals—and sets it aside, then levers herself off the top of the desk where she’s seated, bouncing on her toes when she lands on the floor. “Got a football match party—I’d bring you guys, but—” She shrugs. “Grad students. Loud and sloppy.”

“I’m flattered,” Eames says, “I think.”

“This late?” says Arthur.

“Weird tournament,” Ari replies. “It’s in fucking New Jersey or something terrible. See ya.” She’s been packing her bag as they talk, a new-looking black messenger, and as quick as that she’s flashing a smile and the door is sighing shut behind her.

And then there were two, Eames thinks, and says aloud, “Remember when that used to slam?”

“Fondly,” says Arthur, tone perfectly flat. He’s been hauling things about, bags of shredded paper and boxes of anonymized materiel and smaller pieces of furniture; somewhere around the warehouse his oxford of the day is folded neatly, waiting for him. For now, he’s in a three-to-a-pack white crew-neck with his pressed slacks and spectator boots, and he’s been sweating, and he hasn’t looked at Eames—

Then he does look, and Eames swallows, and in two strides Arthur is standing toe-to-toe with him. “Mr. Eames.” He tips his head forward, their foreheads touching, and his eyes are crinkled at the corners and impossibly, impossibly fond.

It’s as if the last _month_ folds away like origami.

“Where are you headed?” Arthur asks, and the air stirred by his voice touches Eames’s mouth.

“I’ve—” Eames blinks, and laughs, but softly, because Arthur is _right here_ , and it’s not even a reach to press his palms against Arthur’s waist, feel the warmth of him through his t-shirt. The fabric is damp at the small of his back. “Not the least idea, honestly. A hotel, I suppose, or—why, darling? Did you have a suggestion?”

Arthur bites his own lip, fleetingly, a leftover ghost of a tell that Eames had _told_ him to get rid of, and here he is, getting rid of it, and it is only by great force of will that Eames doesn’t bite his lip for him. “Practicality,” he says. “Suite in La Défense. The one I’ve had since we set up shop, so they—”

“Arthur,” says Eames, “are you _asking me around?_ ”

“Fuck off,” replies Arthur, and kisses him.

***

It’s a lovely week, really, even with all the tedium of clearing out the warehouse. Ari’s presence changes everything about the usual post-job drudgery, for the better, as she insists on music and refuses to let the place drop into businesslike silence. “I got enough of that, being little Miss Finch,” she says on the second afternoon, scrolling through an app on her personal phone. “Dance punk, electrohouse, or psytrance?”

Eames, knowing he won’t get an answer, asks, “What _are_ those?”

“Soundgarden,” says Arthur; Eames glances at him sidelong.

Ari nods. “To start. Sure.”

The weather is beautiful, even for July. Yusuf hums along, tunelessly but quietly enough that it’s only amusing, to anything that’s playing. Every so often Arthur sings under his breath, until Ari overhears and starts singing _loud_ , and then they both belt the rest of whatever track it is like they’re competing on a reality show. Ari dances in her seat as she wipes laptops, and once that’s done and the computers are donated to one of the schools, dances on her feet as she carries architectural models and flat-pack furniture to the dumpster. They take it in turns to pick up enormous quantities of takeout twice a day, and Eames personally stocks the fridge (one of the last things to go, he figures) with beer the third morning.

And each night, back to La Defense and Arthur, _with_ Arthur, where very little matters but this universe of each other they’ve discovered. And waking each morning, with Arthur, and it’s not always _romantic_ , but it’s always together, and Eames is—well, he’s rather fond of it, altogether.

 _Rather_. He smirks at himself, and Arthur catches it from where he’s sitting against the headboard “What’s that face for?”

Eames thinks, and then folds his arms behind his head; it’s late, late at night and they’ve left the window open, room lights off. “I’m rather fond of you, it turns out,” he says.

Arthur raises one eyebrow. “Rather,” he repeats, deadpan, bringing out the final _r_ as hard as he can, and then his smile breaks, dimples on both sides of his mouth, and he sprawls toward Eames, ending up with his nose against Eames’s temple and his arm slung over Eames’s waist. “Good,” he mutters. “We’re good.”

It’s the first time in a month that either of them has said _we_ , and Eames thrills quietly.

***

Ari brings a fifth of Macallan— _Macallan_?—the next day, the day before Yusuf’s flight back to Mombasa with his lab equipment. After they break down the galley lab, all the milk crates used for organization and the improvised tabletops and finally the temporary walls, they settle around the center of the warehouse. Ari commandeers a lawn chair and kicks her feet up on the work table with her glass in her hand. Yusuf claims a chair; Arthur grabs the second lawn chair and lets Eames perch at the end. They’re quiet for a while, music off, sipping on their scotch, before Yusuf says, “Hell of a job.”

“You could say that,” Arthur replies, and the ice in his tone—Yusuf’s eyes go wide. Arthur is looking into his own glass, but he’s gone still next to Eames, the kind of stillness he settles into before he starts shooting.

The air goes out of the warehouse; there’s only tension left.

And Ari sighs enormously. “You’re really gonna bitch about that,” she says, wonderingly, letting her head fall back, and Eames stares, because she’s _rolling her eyes_ at Arthur, as she adds, sounding simply exhausted, “Again. Now. You’re gonna bitch about it _now._ ”

Arthur bridles minutely, eyebrows drawing together. He opens his mouth to reply.

“ _Men_. Fuck’s sake.” She tosses back the rest of her scotch like a shot.

The laugh bursts out of Eames before he knows it’s going to. Once he starts, it seems absurd to stop—Ari so aggrieved, and Arthur so offended, and then Arthur blinks and looks up at the ceiling, past it, at the sky and whatever’s beyond it, and then he’s smiling, and Yusuf stops looking petrified and Ari finally giggles, although that might be the liquor hitting her. It’s _catharsis_ if anything is. Perhaps not at the scale of Fischer on the third level—but for _them_ , the four of them who weathered the bunker and came out sane, it’s as good as a promise: they’re okay, they’ll be okay, and they’ll go on working together, or they won’t, but either way, they’ve come through it to laugh. With money in the bank.

Yusuf flies out the next day and the three of them are down to the big stuff, disassembling desks and chairs and cabinets and shoving dividers against the walls—Arthur has photos, of course he does, of the warehouse as it first looked, which they use for reference. They leave enough chairs and stools and things to stand on to reach the windows up to the ceiling and call it a day, after another round of whiskey, sprawled on the floor and waiting out a late-afternoon thunderstorm before they scatter. Ari takes the Macallan when she leaves.

Then it’s only Arthur and Eames and the taste of scotch and cool concrete beneath Eames’s hands. Arthur sets his glass down and straddles Eames’s lap, eyes on his, warm and glinting in the watery late golden sunlight. They’re both dappled with raindrop diffractions, and Eames can remember when he only wished—in the back of his mind, quietly, quietly, guiltily for wishing for anything at all—to see Arthur like this, to _be looked at_ like this, and it’s almost stopped being a shock, how absolutely _right_ it is.

***

Of course, three weeks later everything about the Samtredia job goes straight to hell and Eames doesn’t even have time to check the phone he’s been using sporadically to contact Arthur before he’s faking his own death—not the first time, probably not the last, definitely among the sloppiest—and dumping the trappings of his newly deceased ID into the Rioni. He stops once outside Ianeti, at a dead drop established with one of the two people in Eastern Europe he trusts (now that Dana’s relocated to the southern hemisphere); he snags another ID and its affiliated documentation, liquid currency, and a burner phone, and doesn’t pause for breath until he’s in Sochi.

Gulya—the other Eastern Europe resident, the one who’d suggested him for Samtredia to begin with—meets him there, looking furious, but that’s just how her face is, for the most part; she punches his arm hard enough to bruise and watches while he transfers a nontrivial fraction of his recent earnings into an account in her name, to cover all the crap she’s about to do for him in Georgia. She gives him a buzzcut, down to the scalp—he’s got a week’s worth of beard at this point; it’s a reasonable enough disguise—and hands him off to Pekko, a Finnish chap she trusts with him (or vice versa), and bids him a good decade. If they see each other before then, it’ll be _far_ too soon. While she’d kill for him, because he has killed for her, it’s not exactly the type of friendship where you send holiday cards.

In St. Petersburg, Eames gets a chance to send off a telegram to Yusuf. It’s a scrap of nonsense, or at least it looks like it: _INEVITBL DLAY 3MO WILL C LITTLE BIRD DEC CHEERS_. It goes to Yusuf because he’s rather lacking in other permanent addresses he knows off the top of his head (there’s Cobb’s, but—well, it’d be Cobb); with that done, he kills off the ID he’s used to get from Ianeti to the Baltic, follows Pekko onto a train, and six hours later settles in the Mikkeli safe house for the three months Gulya specified. Pessimistic, he thinks, but then, he’d thought most of the effort Gulya had put into the contingency preplanning had been pessimistic, and look where he is now, three IDs and three thousand klicks away. Pessimism seems like the way to go, for the moment.

So, three months it is.

Three days of his sentence pass before he’s settled enough to think about where he’s been. Only forty days ago—something Biblical there—he and Arthur and Ari stripped all the newsprint from the windows and sprayed everything with rubbing alcohol and declared the warehouse well and truly scrubbed. Ari had them help her kill the Macallan, after; she made pasta for dinner and held court from her drafting stool, while they took the actual dining chairs in her tiny flat.

They’d spun stories and reminiscences and plans and the sort of drunk silliness that happens late at night in the summer. Eames showed off fancy shuffles with a pack of cards until Arthur took the cards off him and showed him up, Ari doubling over laughing while sitting on her own table, legs crossed beneath her, like a mad little witch. At something like three o’clock in the morning, she finally hugged them both and sent them on their way.

They’d each been in their own head, a bit—a long week, a long _job_ , and whiskey sometimes takes you like that—as they rode in the cab back. They lay against each other in their hotel suite, passing a liter bottle of mineral water between them until the sun rose, and then they packed. They didn’t speak of separating, or of anything else. Arthur finally went to settle with the hotel; Eames had to go with him, of course.

It wasn’t until they were waiting for their cab to the airport that Eames really _realized_ , and once he did, he only said, “Darling,” and Arthur turned his head, eyebrows up, dimple out on the left side of his mouth.

Eames kissed him. After a single swallowed noise of protest—for form’s sake—Arthur melted open, sighing and smiling and biting at Eames’s lip a little, and closed his hand gently around Eames’s wrist, fingers cool and strong.

The last he’d heard from Arthur was a text message midway through August, saying only, _NYC is shit. Don’t fuck up._

Fortunately for Eames, he doesn’t follow orders.

After another two days, he makes himself stop thinking about it.

***

The thing with playing dead isn’t that it’s boring; the undercurrent of tension and the perpetual feeling of being a terrible burden on the safe house’s host are enough to keep the nerves humming, mind racing, all of that. Pekko is bleakly good-natured about the whole thing, but that’s not the _point_. The point is that Eames barely sleeps for three months, can’t keep weight on even though he’s not _doing_ anything but pacing about the house. He reads ten or twelve novels and burns through two sketchbooks of nothing, absolute crap, remembered dreamscapes, all of them recycled otherworlds of no place in particular, no features to stick out and wonder about.

But drawing is better than thinking, so he draws. He moves on from landscapes to people, those he knows and those he doesn’t, possible forges and Pekko. And, at odd moments, disembodied hands, shoulders and the rippling tautness of fabric across them, legs in suit trousers and spectator-style boots—he refuses to finish the figure, connect it up, because he’s _not thinking_ about it.

Kutaisi finally believes he’s dead in late November, Gulya says. He plays it safe, or safe-ish, and heads to London, which he _hates_ , but it’s familiar and there’s a bedsit with some of _his_ things and he’s got accounts under his birth name. And a postcard with the Statue of Liberty on it, stamped for early September, with Arthur’s neat block letters spelling out _TOLD YOU._

He supposes he deserves that.

None of the numbers Eames has for Arthur work; the shell network he had set up for the Fischer job is shut down. Which—is a problem for later.

Eames stays just long enough to get in proper contact with Yusuf, to plan his travel back to Mombasa, to buy enough clothes that fit, and to contact Ari.

He’s _nervous_ , bewilderingly so, about the last one: Ariette Vickers, self-made millionaire, going about Paris, doing her doctoral thesis. Well shot of crime, if she wants to be. And she’s more together at twenty-seven—hell, she _was_ more together at twenty-six than he is, now, at thirty-one; it’s absurd to think a woman with her prospects and good name would _want_ to associate with someone so thoroughly entrenched on the criminal side of the world.

But it’s good practice, isn’t it, it’s good _business_ to check in, and it’s been ages, and he’d told Dana he would. And if the dreamshare bug got her as badly as he’s thought it might have—and he remembers now, almost fondly, her rattling on about topology and higher maths and non-Euclidean geometry, only Yusuf really following, down in the bunker—she’ll have been winding herself into knots for months. On the other hand, if her sleep troubles came back, he needs to know; he and Arthur owe her that much.

Well, he knows he does. He doesn’t know about Arthur.

Ari replies to his text message within half an hour, bless her, and Eames is so busy for the rest of the week in London that he forgets to be nervous right up until he arrives at the bar in Paris, right from his shite hotel, directly from Gare du Nord. Early by a few minutes, but he’s got a magazine. And then it all hits at once.

A doctoral student, a polymath with a flair for the impossible, a person who left her home country at sixteen and hasn’t gone back for more than two weeks at a time since. A slip of a thing who wears independence and contrariness and sarcasm like armor, who waltzed into a fake identity like she was born for subterfuge, who saved _Cobb_ from bloody _Limbo_ by sheer stubbornness, who _pulled off inception_ with nothing but theory and dreamshare folklore and some internal compass driven by fury.

A woman with nothing else to prove, and Eames thinks she’ll deign to meet _him_.

He realizes he’s been reading the same sentence for the last five minutes, and that he’s gripping the magazine far too tightly. At the same time, someone says, “I’ll have a St. Germain.” And, at his shoulder, with the creak of the stool next to his, she continues, “Hendricks, if you—yeah, great.”

“Fuck,” says Eames, as he lets out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

Ari, all five foot nothing of her, sets her elbow on the bar and arches her eyebrows at him, warm and amused. For all her former law-abidingness, for all her respectability, she had dived right into the underworld, under her own aegis. _She_ had decided she wanted torture training; _she_ had played Cobb like a fiddle; _she_ had learned to shoot a Glock over a weekend in New South Wales.

And now, here, she says wryly, “I’m not that late, am I?”

Rather perfectly on time, Eames thinks, as always, and she doesn’t bat an eyelash when he hugs her and gets all sentimental.

***

Visiting Arthur, and therefore finding Arthur, has been on his to-do list since London—that bloody postcard; what’s a man to do with _told you_ and a digital disappearing act?—but dinner with Ari in Paris nudges it up several places in order of priority.

Eames travels through Rome and Istanbul and Cairo to collect bits and pieces as necessary before landing in _his flat_ , his home, in Mombasa, where he finally unpacks everything. He has to stay for a week at least, as he’s watching Yusuf’s cats—it’s the least he can do, while Yusuf attends a neurochemistry conference in Mumbai—but the thing about cats is they don’t care that you’re trawling the entirety of the active and inactive dreamshare scene for intel, swapping gossip for more orientated gossip for actual _information_ , as long as you look up from your laptop and web of anonymizers to feed them at more-or-less regular intervals. And Yusuf’s cats are sweet things, anyway. Well, the marmalade and the Russian blue are. The tabby is a bit of a bastard.

When Yusuf returns, Eames announces he’s off again. “But I’ll be back, this time,” he says. “In…well, could be forty-eight hours, could be February.”

“What’s the job?” says Yusuf, offhand, and it’s quite nice, that vote of confidence, that the Kutaisi thing hasn’t entirely blackened Eames’s name—not that he _needs_ a good reputation (as these things go), not for quite a bit, especially now that he’s gotten the remainder of his Fischer earnings squared away in the Swiss account. “Or geopolitical arena?”

“No job,” replies Eames, and he’s about to spin a line of bullshit, but it’s bloody Yusuf, who sold him out but planned to save him, who dosed himself and patrolled the streets of a dream city until it melted into fog. “Arthur,” he says. “I’m—figuring out Arthur.”

Yusuf tips his head forward, eyes sharpening. “Figuring out,” he repeats, and then he smiles, quicksilver. “From here, it looked like you’d gotten it figured, mate.”

Eames feels himself go still. “What?”

“Obviously I’ve had it wrong way ’round,” says Yusuf, shrugging, but there’s still that glitter in his eyes, like there’s a joke Eames hasn’t understood yet. “Go get it figured.”

***

Sixteen thousand kilometers, three plane flights, a train ride, ten minutes’ walking, four minutes of lockpicking, and two minutes of disabling primary, secondary, and tertiary alarms later, Eames gets the joke—had _gotten_ it, Yusuf thought he and Arthur _had already_ —well—and texts Yusuf. _ha ha bloody ha_.

He does up the alarms and the locks again, but leaves a Post-It (there’s a pad of them in a neat little magnetic caddy on the refrigerator, with one of Arthur’s space pens) saying _YOU’VE COMPANY -E_ on the front door, where it’ll be obscured from view by the storm door’s frame. No point in messing about with guns, at this rate, especially as Eames hasn’t brought any of his.

Then he looks around the first floor of Arthur’s townhouse, acquired under his own name a little less than six months ago.

The décor is understated, but not minimal: honey-colored hardwood floors and walls painted slate grey, with light spilling through the patio doors. There are plants all over the place, ferns and palms and a ficus in pots; a colony of very excited spider plants hangs about the kitchen area. In the living room, there’s a squashy-looking sofa and, as Eames learns, a _very_ comfortable club chair; there’s a TV, of course, but more importantly, in the corner opposite the club chair, there’s a lovely-looking turntable on a shelf bearing an entire row of Nine Inch Nails albums—vinyl—and above the turntable, not one but _three_ framed posters.

A shrine.

“Self-fulfillment, darling,” he murmurs. “I can’t imagine how you’d ever thought you weren’t on top of things.” And then Eames catches himself, because he’d been terrified at meeting Ari, hadn’t he? “All right, I _can_ imagine, but we’re both being bloody fools.”

Thirty minutes later, just a bit past sunset, the storm door opens, and Eames _hears_ Arthur bristle from fifteen feet and a room away. His key clicks in the lock and then there’s a little flick-clap-click percussive melody of security system authentication, and then a moment of utter stillness.

“Jackass,” says Arthur, loud and harsh. He’s still out of view from where Eames sits in the club chair.

Eames replies conversationally, “Yes, but you _did_ know that.” He pauses; Arthur doesn’t reply. “You always do your research,” he says.

Arthur rounds the corner and levels a glare at him. “How do you even _manage_ to fuck up that—” He stops, shakes his head quickly, and stares at the wall for a moment, jaw working, before he looks back at Eames. “You were a fucking _horrendous_ business decision.”

Leaning back in the chair he’s claimed, Eames tucks one arm up behind his head as he sucks in a breath. _Were_. That’s a word like a knife; he doesn’t know which way it’s cutting. “So you admit I’m right.”

“You know how much it took to make sure you weren’t dead?” Arthur demands.

Eames looks at him, narrow and tense and infuriated, infuriating, and _remembers_ , just in case he’s fucked it up.

The question is—well, the fact that Arthur’s asking it in the first place means the obvious answers are off the table, so he wouldn’t have simply trusted Yusuf if he rang him up and asked. In which case—oh, they’re playing again—he’ll have dug around and found Gulya, and in _that_ case— “Ten million rubles,” says Eames. It’s a guess, but it seems reasonable, and since Gulya never takes money without knowing what she’ll use it for… “And a line on Kutaisi interests.” He raises his eyebrows, asking, _am I close?_

Arthur’s mouth flickers—the way he flattens his mouth to hide a smile, dimple flashing regardless—and in the next moment he’s standing over Eames, hands braced on the arms of the chair, teeth glinting. “Why are you here?”

There are a thousand answers for that question, including _to tell you off on our little bird’s behalf_ and a few accusations of cruel and unusual postcards. Eames opens his mouth and finds himself unable to speak, until he swallows and discards all of the other possible answers and tells the truth, the realest truth, the core of it. “Well,” he says, “I’ve missed you, darling.”

Arthur doesn’t bother to roll his eyes. “ _Jesus_ ,” he says, disgusted, and then he kisses him, grabs his shoulders and sinks into his lap and kisses him, pulls back and _laughs,_ freely, disbelievingly, and says, “Jesus, _Eames_ ,” and kisses him. “Fucking jackass,” he mutters, and kisses him again. He buries his face in Eames’s shoulder and says, muffled, “Don’t that again. Please.”

“Specificity,” Eames replies, and only laughs when Arthur flips him off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this worked out differently from how I thought it would, but I am pleased.
> 
> the Little Bird 'verse is going to take a bit of a break, but this sandbox is 100% still in play, just so you know. thank you _so much_ for your support, kudos, comments - oh, thank you so much.

**Author's Note:**

> (work and chapter titles are from NIN's track Dear World, which seems apropros.)


End file.
